Towards Sustainable Industrial Automation Systems

Abstract

We identified a set of open issues in the context of software aging and long-living systems with respect to the application domain of industrial automation systems, e.g. process control [7] and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems. Existing systems in the automation domain suffer from expensive evolution and maintenance as well as from long release cycles. One of the root causes for this is that longevity was not considered during their construction. Most of the solutions that can be found today are not domain-specific, and tend to focus rather on symptoms than on causes. Therefore, we initiated a research project which has the target to define more clearly what domain-specific longevity means, to survey existing approaches, and to derive methods and techniques for addressing the mentioned problem in the industrial automation domain. In this contribution we present the objectives of this project and outline our state of progress.