This paper first examines the current state of industrial practice of documentation in automated production systems based on a large-scale survey in machine and plant manufacturing proving that companies still face major challenges in documentation. However, insufficient documentation may increase the risk of malfunction and high costs, and im-pede system development due to lack of traceability, especially for control software being one of the main functional-ity carriers. Therefore, secondly, a risk priority indicator RPI4DD is proposed to systematically capture the lack of control code documentation to avoid undesired costs due to inadequate documentation.     «

This paper first examines the current state of industrial practice of documentation in automated production systems based on a large-scale survey in machine and plant manufacturing proving that companies still face major challenges in documentation. However, insufficient documentation may increase the risk of malfunction and high costs, and im-pede system development due to lack of traceability, especially for control software being one of the main functional-ity carriers. Therefore, secondly, a...     »