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Analyzing Variability in Automation Software with the Variability Analysis Toolkit

Published: 09 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Control software for automated production systems (aPs) becomes increasingly complex as it evolves due to changing requirements. To address varying customer demands or altered regulatory guidelines, it is common practice to create a new system variant by copying and subsequently modifying existing control software. Referred to as clone-and-own, proper documentation is typically not cherished, thereby entailing severe maintenance issues in the long-run. To mitigate such problems and to reinstate sustainable development, respective software systems need to be compared and their variability information needs to be reverse-engineered. However, recent work identified variability management in the domain of aPs to remain a challenging endevour and appropriate tool support to be missing.
We bridge this gap and introduce the Variability Analysis Toolkit (VAT), an extensible platform that allows for the customizable definition of metrics to compare IEC61131-3 control software variants as well as providing means to visualize results. The VAT facilitates a working environment that allows for the exchange of produced results between users. By that, we aim to support engineers in re-engineering control software systems by providing them with means to define metrics based on their individual demands. We demonstrate the feasibility of the VAT using 24 software system variants implemented in accordance to the IEC61131-3 standard.

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  • (2023)The e4CompareFrameworkProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3579028.3609012(34-38)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)True Variability Shining Through Taxonomy MiningProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608989(182-193)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
SPLC '19: Proceedings of the 23rd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B
September 2019
252 pages
ISBN:9781450366687
DOI:10.1145/3307630
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 09 September 2019

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Author Tags

  1. automation software
  2. legacy systems
  3. software product lines
  4. tooling
  5. variability

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SPLC 2019

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Overall Acceptance Rate 167 of 463 submissions, 36%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)A Platform-Independent Code Model for Operation and Information Technologies Convergences in Industrial Edge Applications2024 IEEE 33rd International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (ISIE)10.1109/ISIE54533.2024.10595705(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
  • (2023)The e4CompareFrameworkProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3579028.3609012(34-38)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)True Variability Shining Through Taxonomy MiningProceedings of the 27th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3579027.3608989(182-193)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Extracting Hardware Reconfiguration Models Based on Knowledge Synthesis from STEP Files2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)10.1109/MODELS-C59198.2023.00077(434-443)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Visualizations for the evolution of Variant-Rich SystemsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.107084154:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Automated Integration of Heteregeneous Architecture Information into a Unified ModelSoftware Architecture10.1007/978-3-031-42592-9_6(83-99)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Synchronizing software variantsProceedings of the 26th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3503229.3547053(82-89)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2022
  • (2022)Boosting Extra-Functional Code Reusability in Cyber-Physical Production Systems: The Error Handling Case StudyIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2022.314281610:1(60-73)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Re-engineering Automation Software with the Variability Analysis ToolkitHandbook of Re-Engineering Software Intensive Systems into Software Product Lines10.1007/978-3-031-11686-5_16(405-428)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2022
  • (2021)Comparison of Two Concepts for Planned Reuse of Variant-rich IEC 61131-3-based Control Software2021 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM)10.1109/IEEM50564.2021.9672967(713-720)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2021
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