Extension of Electronic Device Description Language for analysing change impacts in modular automation in manufacturing plants

The engineering process of a manufacturing plant involves different disciplines, for example mechanical, electrical and software engineering. Each discipline contains information from different manufacturing expertise. Changes in one of these disciplines can influence other disciplines. In order to define the dependencies between these disciplines and to analyse their change impacts, manufacturing plants should be hierarchically and disciplinarily modularised and described using a uniform description language. In this paper, a device description language - Electronic Device Description Language (EDDL) - was chosen and extended semantically and syntactically aimed at analysing change impacts in modular automation. The extended EDDL is not only a device description language; it also provides a concept for analysing change impacts through describing the relations between discipline-specific components and interdisciplinary modules as well as the dependencies between information from different disciplines. Predicting theses change impacts enables the engineers to foresee unanticipated changes and maximises the probability for the project's success.