A roundtrip engineering approach for data consistency in process industry environments

During the planning phases of a chemical plant, a great number of domain-specific data models are created, all of which influence one another. Marking these models consistent with each other in process industry environments usually still involves a large amount of manual work. This article proposes an approach to reach data consistency over the whole plant life cycle automatically, with a prospect of interoperability across engineering environments. This is achieved by adapting the well-known roundtrip engineering concepts from software development to process industry models and use cases. In this way it will be possible to create and synchronise models from heterogeneous areas.