Evolution in industrial plant automation: A case study

Industrial plants are operated a long period of time. Hence, evolution of these plants is necessary to cope with technological developments or market requests. However, evolution cycles of disciplines involved in cooperative design of such plants are different. Therefore, further research needs to be investigated in order to provide an integrated variant and version management, i.e. evolution management, of such plants. As a first step towards solving this issue, this paper presents an abstract model for industrial plant evolution and analyses it using a detailed case study in the industrial plant automation domain.