Enhanced engineering of down timeless system evolution by use of hardware capability descriptions within the εCEDAC approach

Downtimeless evolution of distributed automation systems (changes during runtime) sets high demands on the underlying concepts and methodologies. Within the εCEDAC project a sophisticated description of the underlying system, including state information as well as capabilities of the hardware, is used. In combination with an engineering tool it offers a great amount of engineering support, thus keeping the complexity manageable. This paper illustrates the application of this technology especially for evolution engineering. Herein, the εCEDAC approach provides a mean for checking the correctness of the process of downtimeless evolution by use of a reconfiguration application.