Success Factors for the Design of Field-level Control Code in Machine and Plant Manufacturing - an Industrial Survey -

Abstract

Abstract The amount of software in automated production systems, including its development effort, is continuously increasing to currently up to 35-50% of the development personnel. Consequently, success factors for achieving modularity and complexity management of control software are of high economic interest. Scientific solutions are manifold but often not implemented in industry. This paper introduces the study QoaPS SWE (Quality of automated Production Systems’ Software Engineering) providing insights into 61 machine and plant manufacturing companies to give quantitative and qualitative results to five essential research questions on success factors in the design of field-level control code. Compared to preceding surveys, QoaPS SWE achieves statistically significant results for software maturity (MMOD+), complexity, and model-based software engineering and provides detailed insights into causes and consequences for single criteria, thus clearly identifying obstacles to be addressed in future research and with industrial countermeasures. Especially staff qualification and organizational issues are identified as obstacles to applying the object-oriented programming paradigm for control software in machine and plant manufacturing. Validity is ensured by analyzing the statistical significance of the results in addition to comparisons with earlier surveys and interviews as well as the comparison with already existing and accepted maturity levels. The provided qualitative and quantitative results will allow the benchmarking of companies’ maturity and the derivation of concrete recommendations for companies depending on their MMOD+ value and the evaluated characteristics.