Documentation System for WinCC OA applications

Project Specification

The project focuses on the evaluation of different technologies for the documentation of the JCOP and UNICOS frameworks software components (based on WinCC Open Architecture)

In this scope propose a help system for; (1) WinCC OA developers to easily document and consult generated documentation; (2) WinCC OA users in the applications to access the application help

Abstract

Most of the control system applications that are used at CERN are developed with the use of different pieces of software. One of them is WinCC OA, a commercial SCADA tool developed by Siemens. The others are frameworks, like JCOP and UNICOS that were written at CERN and are built and run under the context of WinCC OA. The other one is the JCOP framework, a tool that is written at CERN and is built and runs under the context of WinCC OA. However, while these tools are co-dependent, they have completely separate sets of documentation. WinCC OA, in particular, uses a powerful help system that is built with tools that are provided by the Qt and Qt help framework. On the other hand, JCOP uses Doxygen to generate its documentation from annotated code sources. This documentation is later displayed in HTML pages that are installed locally in the computer and provide very little functionality. The main challenges of this project are as follows (1) to find a way to properly integrate the existent documentation into the help browser that is used by WinCC OA; (2) while also finding solutions that would give the help system more functionalities than were available before.

Keywords: WinCC OA, SCADA, JCOP, UNICOS, Doxygen, Qt, Qt help