Preventing Technical Debt for Automated Production System Maintenance Using Systematic Change Effort Estimation with Considering Contingent Cost

Technical debt (TD) describes the long-term negative effect of choosing sub-optimal solutions to achieve a short-term benefit (e.g., cost saving). Engineers from various disciplines, such as mechanical, electrical and software, develop and maintain automated production systems (aPS). Over their development and maintenance period, changes in one discipline might have negative or unexpected impact on the other disciplines due to the interwoven dependencies among the disciplines. Manually derived task list might omit some necessary tasks and, therefore, TD is quite often introduced unintentionally. Also, the interest of TD due to insufficient knowledge sometimes exceeds the short-term cost saving. In this paper, a workflow is proposed to assist in the solution selection process for the aPS domain. The workflow includes the systematic change effort estimation tool considering multidiscipline and TD interest estimation. KAMP4aPS is selected as a tool to estimate the change effort by deriving a fine-grained task list for a modification. Based on such detailed estimation and additional cost factors, one can foresee TD and choose appropriate solution, which fits the current business context. An exemplary change scenario in a lab size plant is presented to demonstrate the suggested methodology.