Applying Visualization Concepts to Large-Scale Software Systems in Industrial Automation

In recent years, the field of industrial automation is experiencing a dramatic increase of software development and maintenance effort. Driven by shorter product life-cycles and customizable products, production systems are becoming more and more complex, presenting new challenges for control software engineers. In this paper, we report on a visualization concept we applied to industrial automation software. It allows automation software developers to take a look at their software system from a new perspective. Various ways of interacting with the visualization offer further benefits, such as the convenient tracing of control and information flow across multiple hierarchies. We conducted a workshop with five industrial domain experts as a first evaluation of the usefulness of the visualization. Based on their feedback, we discuss open questions and next steps.