Metodologija razvoja programske opreme za vodenje industrijskih procesov : doktorska disertacija

slovenian

doktorska dela

2012

Univerza v Mariboru, Fakulteta za elektrotehniko računalništvo in informatiko

The main topic of this doctoral dissertation is software engineering in the domain of industrial process control. The state-of-the-practice of process control software engineering is immature and is unable to address the market demands for increasing the quality and scale of the software, shorter time-to-market periods, and efficient development. The proposed state-of-the-art development approaches have not been accepted by the developers and industry, because they are immature and they do not solve the most important issues of the process control domain that are discussed in the literature. In this doctoral dissertation we have developed a state-of-the-art methodology for the development of process control software. It was developed systematically based on some of the ideas from the areas of model-driven engineering, domain-specific modeling languages, and software product lines. These ideas were applied in such a way that the methodology addresses the most important issues of the process control domain, while trying to avoid the weaknesses of the already-proposed state-of-the-art development approaches. The methodology consists of two levels: the infrastructure development level and the application development level. The first level is responsible for the systematic development of the infrastructure, which consists of an application-development process definition and the corresponding development guidelines, a formal domain-specific modeling language, a model transformations definition and supporting software tools. These tools enable a partial automation of the application development according to the proposed methodology and consist of amodel editor, a model repository and a code generator. In the context of the doctoral dissertation a laboratory prototype and an industrial prototype of the support tools have been developed. The latter eliminates the deficiencies of the laboratory prototype and is suitable for the development of real-life process control software. In the second level the infrastructure is used for the model-driven engineering of the process control software. Through a well-defined application development process a software model is created, fromwhich the code for programmable logic controllers is eventually, automatically generated. The evaluation of the methodology has been carried out empirically in the form of a case study into which engineers from a Slovenian company were included. This case study has demonstrated that the methodology is useful for the development of real-life process control software. We have also shown that the methodology increases the effectiveness when compared to the development approach that is used in practice. More specifically, it increases the productivity and the quality.

07.08.2023