While it would be nice to edit AOIs online, it can be a good thing. Some people don't understand their use and not allowing edits has saved me a phone call or two, by then screwing things up. It just requires better planning. I personally make AOIs generic and they are thoroughly tested before commissioning, so I've never needed to edit them online.
I need to send my users over to your plant so you can train them. Mine change their minds more often than the wind changes direction.
Shutting down the process to allow an offline edit-download just isn't going to fly. If you can't edit something - AOI or any other new thing - online then it just isn't workable in a continuous process.
Rockwell used to require stopping the process and downloading to add a rack to controlnet. That's been fixed. Same with changing the io scan on devicenet. That's been fixed. The AOI editing will eventually be fixed, or there will be a work-around where you can search and replace, or some such thing.
It would be awesome to make a generic AOI and test all of the boundary conditions before implementing. In my experience, that would require the programmer to know more about the process than the process engineers do ... or the AOI does a very defined but limited subset of the required alarming and status reporting, and there is external logic that handles any differences.
Right now, my subroutines include all alarming, status and control logic. 90+ % of the motors are 'simple' and the remainder are 'General'. So 2 subroutines cover 800 motors. Then I have 4 or 5 more that are just too weird and they are done with custom logic. Gates/valves are divided into Diverters and Gates. Again, 100+ fit into those 2 categories and 4 or 5 are just too different.
But I'm at Rev 8 on the motor logic, rev 5 on the gate logic.
Could I do AOI now that I have the logic tested and debugged? Sure. But that would break some of the logic that is running with global arrays, so it is not really worth it.
Maybe when ControlLogix is retired, and we replace our DeltaV/ControlLogix system with a unified ... whatever is king of the hill at that time ... AOIs can be edited online and templates take the information direct to the historian, the alarm log, the HMI faceplate, and the IO. One can always dream