Towards a Circular Economy of Industrial Software

Abstract Software has become an indispensable part of industrial production and thus influences the life cycle of manufacturing systems, as many of these systems have to be replaced or evolved due to changing requirements. Software adaptation through continuous evolution extends the service time of these systems and thus saves valuable resources. In this paper we present an interdisciplinary methodology for reengineering legacy software to increase the productive lifetime. Our proposed approach systematically reuses implicit domain knowledge to evolve, validate and commission new software from legacy code. The approach is evaluated on a CNC machine as a special type of industrial system.