openMDM® Framework: Peak Solution adds workflow components to openMDM® Framework

In the field of our customer’s vehicle safety, huge amounts of measured data need to be stored and evaluated. For the standardized administration of this wide variety of information, openMDM® Framework is deployed. It works as a kind of data hub which records data from different measurement systems, storing them in a structured way together with metadata for the description of the measured data, and enabling the data to be interpreted with a wide variety of evaluation tools.

The ASAM ODS data standard ensures a manufacturer independent description of the information, thus creating the provision that the data can be used over a long period of time.

Most measured data repeatedly run through the same predefined evaluation and calculation processes. Since it is very time consuming and laborious for test engineers to select and process individual data each time, our customer looked for ways of simplifying this task. The objective was to convert individual process steps into an automated workflow. For the definition of work sequences, the workflow specific part of the ASAM ODS application model is used.

For this purpose, Peak Solution developed a suitable interface and a workflow interpreter, which executes workflow definitions stored in the ODS database.

In the respective application, terabytes of measured data are imported into the MDM system. A user or the import process select the data intended for evaluation and pass it on to a previously defined workflow. In the course of the workflow, the data can for instance be used for calculations, passed on to applications that process them, such as DIAdem, Famos or Excel; test results can be imported, and the status of data changed or various messages sent to users. In parallel with this, the workflow interpreter writes many different types of tracing information to the database. This information allows the process sequence to be evaluated later on, documenting how a specific test result was achieved.

Since the workflow definitions are stored in the ODS database in a structured way, it is very simple to re-use existing sub-processes in different workflows or to put them together quickly to form completely new workflows. This way, recurring routine tasks are considerably sped up and standardized and costs for measurement data management are kept low at the same time.