Assessing the industrial applicability and adoption potential of the AUKOTON model driven control application engineering approach

Challenges in software development for automation and control have increased because of various reasons, including the size of applications and competition within the industry. A potential solution could be the use of a model-driven engineering approach to facilitate the development process and design information flow. Despite the wide interests towards model-based techniques in the automation domain, the authors have not been able to find a complete, tool supported UML based MDE approach, the industrial relevance of which would have been systematically assessed. In this paper, we intend to assess the suitability and usefulness of the AUKOTON development process and tools to development of industrial automation and control applications. To study these questions, we organized a laboratory project, in which industrial professionals used our development process and tools, and used qualitative research methods for gathering the industrial feedback.