A View-based Approach Towards an Engineering Platform for Industrial Automation in the Cloud

Recently, cloud computing gained more and more traction, not only in fast moving domains such as private and enterprise software, but also in more traditional domains such as industrial automation. To some extent this is also driven by the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) which encompasses aspects from both automation as well as cloud computing. However, for rolling out automation software as a service solutions to low-end, long-tail markets with thousands of small customers important aspects for cloud scalability such as easy self service for the customer are still missing. There exists a large gap between the engineering efforts required to configure an automation system and the effort automation companies and their customers can afford. At the same time, tools for implementing Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) have recently become more and more efficient and easy to use. Tailored DSLs that make use of abstractions for the particular (sub-)domains and omitting other complexities would allow customers to handle their applications in a SaaS-oriented, self-service manner. In this paper we present a view-based approach for engineering languages for a multi-domain automation cloud platform that facilitates modern DSL frameworks. This will allow automation SaaS providers to rapidly design sub-domain specific engineering tools based on a common platform. End-customers can then use these tailored languages to engineer their specific applications in an efficient manner.