Flexible Specification of STEP Application Protocol Extensions and Automatic Derivation of Tool Capabilities

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) build mechatronic systems using components from several suppliers in industry sectors like automation. The suppliers provide geometrical information via the standardized exchange format STEP, such that the OEM is able to virtually layout the overall system. Beyond the geometrical information, the OEM needs additional technical information for his development tasks. For that reason, STEP provides an extension mechanism for extending and tailoring STEP to project-specific needs. However, extending STEP moreover requires extending several capabilities of all involved tools, causing high development effort. This effort prevents the project-specific utilization of the STEP extension mechanism and forces the organizations to use awkward workarounds. In order to cope with this problem, we present a model-driven approach enabling the flexible specification of STEP extensions and particularly the automatic derivation of the required further capabilities for two involved tools. We illustrate and evaluate the approach with an automation production system example.