Maturity Levels for Automation Software Engineering in automated Production Systems

The amount of software and its development effort in machine and plant manufacturing is continuously increasing to currently up to 35-50% of the development personnel. However, achieving mature automation software that is adaptable to changed requirements during runtime for lifetimes of several decades still poses major challenges for machine and plant manufacturing companies. Previous industrial case studies show that companies deal with these challenges with different success. However, maturity levels are still missing to categorize and compare companies' automation software and development processes and, thus, enable a cross-company benchmark. Available approaches from computer science to categorize software maturity often do not consider the characteristics of automation software or only focus on individual aspects of maturity. Thus, this paper introduces the results of a large-scale questionnaire study with 61 German machine and plant manufacturing companies to enlarge an established maturity classification with quantitative and qualitative results on success factors in the design of automation software.