Service Management for Development Tools

Abstract

Tools used in development processes in chemical engineering and plastics processing are often highly heterogeneous with respect to the necessary software and hardware. In the previous chapter, several functionalities for improving a development process in different aspects was presented. But one problem still remains: when coupling such heterogeneous tools, many technical details are to be considered.

This section describes a service management platform that aims at hiding such technical details from new tools as well as from developers, and at ensuring a performant execution of all tools and services. The integrative support presented in this section is located at a lower level. Here, the focus is on the provision of a transparent, efficient, and fault-tolerant access to services within the prototype developed in IMPROVE. A framework was developed that allows efficient communication support, and the management of both, integrated tools and external services. The framework also allows an a-posteriori integration of existing development tools into the management platform. Framework and management are applied at platform level in this section.