Vienna/Brühl – The HIMA Group is a provider of smart security solutions for industrial applications. Out of 800 worldwide, about one third of its 450 employees in Germany work in research and development. Of these, around 60 are developers who use Enterprise Architect to create models and generate software code for embedded and PC applications. Since development must always comply with functional safety requirements, precise traceability in the versioning of the models is an essential criterion. They had been searching for a tool to facilitate easier versioning and traceability when, during an Enterprise Architect training course, they became aware of LemonTree. Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Stefan Müller, Team Manager Development Software at HIMA: “In general, standards such as IEC 61508 demand configuration management. This also applies to UML models. LieberLieber’s LemonTree is our key to efficiently determining what has changed, and in which revision.” Electrical, electronic and programmable electronic systems are increasingly responsible for keeping machinery and equipment safe. The IEC 61508 basic standard applies across industries to systems that perform safety functions. It describes how the products are functionally-safely designed and developed.

Highest demands on security
First, a workshop was held to define the cornerstones of the joint project. In preparation, the existing models had to be checked and, if necessary, corrected. There was also a desire to automate this controlling process and integrate it into LemonTree for further processing. Dr. Konrad Wieland, Product Manager for LemonTree at LieberLieber: “We are pleased to support HIMA in versioning with LemonTree. Demands on the project are very high, but this merely spurs us on to show that we can also satisfy them. We see ourselves as knowledge leaders when it comes to Enterprise Architect and model versioning.”

Currently around 35 developers work with LemonTree at HIMA and there are regular voting meetings for the further development of the tool. One of the major challenges was the integration of Subversion (SVN), a software for centralized version control of files and directories. Since the developers create five to ten new versions daily, the integration process must be short. Oliver Mummenthey, software developer at HIMA, comments: “The LieberLieber team was able to increase the performance of LemonTree immensely even for our models of up to 6GB in size. Through close cooperation we are achieving excellent results, which serves to greatly strengthen our confidence in LieberLieber.” The advantages of the “UniqueMint” infrastructure developed by LieberLieber, which is especially suitable for high-performance reading and writing of models, soon became quite clear.

Seamless integration into the HIMA infrastructure
LieberLieber’s know-how was in high demand when it came to the seamless integration of model-based development into HIMA’s demanding environment. “We have vast practical experience with a wide variety of infrastructures, and we are experienced in transforming them into a productive modeling environment. We adopt our customers’ guidelines and internal procedures, for example with regard to versioning, variant management or product family engineering. Our strategy and the tools we use are designed to seamlessly integrate modeling into the existing setting. We realize that newly-added modeling tools must not dictate the processes, but must adapt to existing processes,” states Wieland