Navigating between tools in heterogeneous Automation Systems Engineering landscapes

Automation Systems Engineering projects typically depend on the collaboration of several engineering disciplines. While available software tools are supporting individual engineering disciplines quite well, there is very little work on tool collaboration and engineering process automation across discipline boundaries. Following a sequential process structure with distributed and parallel activities, an efficient integration of loosely linked heterogeneous engineering tool models for information retrieval or model consistency checking for quality assurance (QA) requires high human effort. Mechatronic objects provide a logical view on integrated data from mechanical, electrical, and software engineering but there is limited support of heterogeneous and dynamic engineering tool models. Based on so-called engineering objects this paper introduces the capability of single-click navigation between heterogeneous engineering tools taking into account the different views on common engineering concepts. The proposed approach is evaluated by using an example from the process automation domain. Major results are that navigation increases the understanding and traceability of complex relations and thus enables the efficient diagnosis of deviations between models.