On Industrial Automation Software Development; Modeling, Analysis and Execution Using Automation Components and IEC 61499

Licentiate thesis, 2006

Ever increasing need for new personalized products drives the development of flexible manufacturing system. Due to their complexity they are controlled using distributed control systems that use many cooperating computers for the control task. The computers execute the control software application that orchestrates the equipment of the manufacturing process towards the common goal of product making. The development process of the software application may be divided in two major steps. Generation of the control function and transformation of that function into executable control code. For the generation of the control function the development model presented in the thesis uses discrete event models and the synthesis algorithms provided by the formal framework of supervisory control theory. For the executable code the new IEC 61499 standard is used since it provides communication primitives necessary for software applications in distributed control systems. The first contribution presents a method for automatic transformation of synchronously executed discrete event models into IEC 61499 function block applications. On the other hand, the second contribution presents a method for generation of the discrete event models from already existing IEC 61499 function block applications. The second method makes the us- age of supervisory control theory possible for the verification of correctness of the modeled application. The third contribution presents a framework for component based soft- ware development for distributed control systems. It is based on software units called automation components and their composition using a novel approach of utilization hierarchy along side usual implementation hiding and grouping using aggregation hierarchy. The utilization hierarchy provides the capability needed for abstraction of functionality in control applications that makes dynamic zooming during the application simulation feasible.