Quality assurance for data from low-tech participants in distributed automation engineering environments

Participants in modern automation engineering projects typically work distributed and in parallel. Therefore, there are advanced approaches for integrating the data of specific engineering tools and systems. However, in these projects there are also participants who do not work with the specific engineering tool set but provide important data updates, e.g., customer representatives. A major challenge is to provide systematic and efficient quality assurance for these inputs. In this paper we describe an approach to provide efficient quality assurance when importing data from general purpose tools such as Excel into an integrated engineering data set. We report on experiences with initial prototypes and compare the improved with a traditional data import process to discuss advantages, risks, and further improvements.