Building a Web-Based Federated Toolchain: Lessons Learned From a Four-Year Industrial Project

Big companies use many tools, jointly referred to as the toolchain, to manage vast amounts of engineering data being generated across an application lifecycle. Individual tools are typically designed to perform specific engineering tasks, and rely on specific data formats. This leads to problems when attempting to automate engineering tasks that are not supported by a particular tool, and which require data from multiple tools. This paper presents the experiences and lessons learned from an industrial research-project within the heavy vehicle manufacturer Scania, where the project goal was to identify and industrialize technologies and principles that solve the above problem. The presented lessons cover architectural, technological, and organizational aspects of a toolchain development-process. In addition, as a consequence of the lessons learned, the toolchain architecture and tool-interface architecture is also presented.