Industrial Test-Bench Software

The careful and intelligent use of scarce resources has always been a principle of sustainability and profitability. Especially in times of energy transition, this also applies to the use of water, thermal energy, gas and electricity. The collection of the relevant consumption data is thereby carried out by intelligent meters.

For the production and qualification during production of such devices, redlogix has implemented a comprehensive application and communication framework. The field of activity includes the development and continuous expansion of a software platform, starting with the communication support of production facility components and electronic products, through the implementation of production-controlling applications to the creation of highly specialized single-user applications for individual production steps.

By deploying the software implemented by redlogix to several production lines, average testing times have been dramatically reduced and the production cycle rates have been significantly increased compared to the previous systems.

Services by redlogix

• Requirements analysis
• Design and development of various UI applications for production plants and single workplaces
• Design and development of reusable application modules and UI elements
• Design and development of a framework for component communication
• Design and development of components for production equipment interconnection
• Integration of database systems
• Integration of a SOAP based system for data exchange
• Integration of user administration via LDAP
• Development and definition of production and testing sequences
• Module, integration and system tests
• Documentation with Doxygen

Communication Framework HYCore

The customer's production facilities require distributed applications that need to communicate with a wide variety of components in a heterogeneous environment. To simplify the creation of such applications, HYCore was implemented - a middleware that connects all participants of these distributed systems. Here, the individual components, their services, protocols and attributes are described in an IDL (Interface Description Language) and activated in the system at runtime according to a usage-specific deployment plan. This way, the various applications can access resources such as reference balances, transponder readers, label printers or lasers.

To allow for early testing of new components, e.g. a digital IO module, even before integrating them into an application, the HYCoreDemonstrator tool was implemented for HYCore. Thus, different function calls and processes can be tested and verified in advance.

Application Framework DMPAcE

Building on the HYCore, DMPAcE (Diehl Metering Production Application Environment) provides ready-to-use libraries and modules to define specific applications. A plug-in concept with reusable extensions is realized in this way. For example, there are extensions representing the system overview, process monitoring, order processing, etc. Test and production sequences are defined in the form of JSON files and can be visualized and controlled via a test sequence view.

DMPAcE also offers modules for automatically generating error reports, a service registry for application-wide services such as notification and application configuration, database access and much more.

The Qt Linguist also makes it relatively easy to translate applications into different languages, which greatly simplifies the setup for operation at production sites in foreign countries.

Project Management

The collaboration with the client was done within an agile, SCRUM-based project management system and by using the tool OpenProject to manage work packages, change requests and bug reports.