Facilitating Services and Engineering Process Management in Distributed Engineering of Control Applications

Engineering of information and control systems for process and manufacturing facilities is a complex multidisciplinary effort. The engineering processes are often interwoven between different teams and enterprises making both the exchange of technical engineering data and management of engineering processes challenging. Business process management is applied to the engineering processes in order to improve engineering effectiveness and ease management of distributed activities. Modeling engineering processes as business processes and implementing them executable enables many tasks to be automated and supported with information systems. In combination with service bus based system integration the information exchange and the use of various services can be enhanced. A prototype service infrastructure with engineering services has been implemented to prove the concept. Exemplary engineering processes have been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of executing routine tasks automatically and improving management of both human and information system tasks.