Preface to the

              First Workshop on
  Industrial Automation Tool Integration for
       Engineering Project Automation
                 (iATPA 2011)
                            held in conjunction with the

      16th IEEE International Conference on Emerging
     Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA'2011)
               09.09.2011, Toulouse, France

                      http://cdl.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/iatpa2011

Modern real-world and large-scale industrial systems engineering projects involve the
cooperation of a wide range of engineering systems and tools that use different technical
platforms and heterogeneous data models. The engineering of e.g., power plants or car
manufactures requires coordinated information exchange between different engineering
disciplines (e.g., process, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering), which is
complex and hard to achieve using traditional systems engineering techniques. Well-
established software engineering methods and approaches (e.g., iterative development
processes, issue tracking systems) could provide additional value to systems engineering
projects, but require careful integration and seamless collaboration with other
engineering fields to achieve industrial acceptance.

Today's system integration technologies are suitable to bridge most of the technical and
semantic gaps between these automation systems engineering tools. However, error-
prone and time-consuming human work (e.g., manually copying information from one to
another tool) is needed to handle integration concerns at the interfaces of different
engineering disciplines as each of them has their specific engineering tools and
engineering systems. Therefore the definition, enactment, and monitoring of automated
engineering processes crossing several interfaces is hard to define and establish.

The goal of the workshop is the investigation of methods and techniques for the
automation support of automation systems engineering processes to improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of engineering projects.