Project

SysML4Industry is a module of the Christian Doppler Laboratory on Systems Engineering Integration for Flexible Automation Systems. It addresses the upcoming need of Automation Systems Engineering (ASE) to raise the level of flexibility of automation systems even further in order to better react to changing environments. For instance, this is of particular importance in the context of the emerging Industry 4.0 initiative which aims, amongst other goals, at providing increased flexibility for production systems to better adapt to the changing needs of customers, organizations, and society.

As a consequence, systems are no longer designed to be, but they have to be designed to evolve. Of course, raising the level of flexibility by switching to evolvable systems directly impacts the requirements on and complexity of the engineering process for such systems. To cope with this new kind complexity in ASE, dedicated concepts, techniques, and tools are needed to enable change and to ensure a systematic, safe, and predictable adaptation of systems to prevent the negative side effects of ad-hoc changes. A promising way to tackle this problem is to apply modeling and simulation approaches in combination with the establishment of adaptations as first class entities throughout the whole engineering process which is the mission of SysML4Industry.

Model-based Systems Engineering with SysML The OMG Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is an international standardized graphical modeling language to describe and specify technical systems in architecture, behavior and requirements. It is also useful for specification of production scenarios, cyber-physical-systems and production states for Industry 4.0 Smart Factories.	Model Transformation Model Transformation is a key concept in data integration and code generation scenarios. In the SysML4Industry project the OMG Query/View/Transformation (QVT) standard will be used to describe an execute such model transformations. We will implement an execution engine for the graphical QVT-Relations standard for usage with the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect modeling platform.	Automation Systems Engineering On the automation engineering side, different standards are evaluated and supported as one part of the data integration. A new upcoming standard is the Automation Markup Language (AutomationML). This XML-based standard is used to exchange production system data including architectural aspects, 3D data and logical aspects required by Industry 4.0.