TOWARDS AN INTEGRATION OF DIFFERENT SPECIFICATION METHODS BY USING THE VIEWPOINT FRAMEWORK

Abstract

In industrial interdisciplinary projects where engineers of different sorts have to work together, a framework is necessary in order to support such an interdisciplinary development process. For example, the design information created by the production automation engineer has to be set into relation to the software architecture the software designer has to produce which will control the automation plant. Such requirements result in the need to consistently integrate various specification methods and development processes performed during the various development stages. This contribution shows that such an integration of heterogeneous specification methods concerning the various heterogeneous components of production automation systems can be achieved using the ViewPoint framework. This framework provides an intuitive understanding of different specifications involved in the development process, on the one side. On the other side the ViewPoint framework allows for a consistent and correct integration of these specifications due to its existing formalization by distributed graph transformation.