Christian Schwab

Formal models for the verification of IEC 61499 function block based control applications

Industrial automation is currently on the cusp to the application of distributed systems based on distributed intelligence enabling distributed decision making within control. As one main technology within this field IEC 61499 based function block systems would be applied. But the usage of function block systems may cause problems which have to be avoided prior to the integration of a function block system in a control system. Hence, function block systems need to be examined using formal models and formal verification technologies. Therefore, formal models need to be created automatically during the function block system design. Within this paper an algorithm for automatic model design and its integration in the function block system designer would be described

Integration of Scalable Safety and Security Actions in IEC 61499 Control Applications

In the last decade, manufacturing automation systems have experienced a strong trend towards an increasing complexity, variability and flexibility caused by growing product spectra and declining lot sizes. To cope with the growing requirements of today’s automation system, the application of modular mechatronical units have been explored resulting in distributed control systems. An upcoming Standard, the IEC 61499 Function Blocks, provides the according programming technologies for the engineer to handle such systems. With the application of distributed control systems and the Integration of new communication technologies as for example Industrial Ethernet communication systems the communication within control systems grows up and reaches a new level were system safety and security get a higher impact on the applicability of manufacturing systems. These two aspects are not yet directly covered by the IEC 61499 Standard. Within this paper a possible way of Integration of necessary activities to ensure system safety and security (so called Safety and Security Actions) in a Standard conform way in a distributed control system is described.

Aspect orientation and object orientation of control application code for distributed control systems in TORERO

The application of distributed control systems is one of the main trends in current automation. Here, besides the programming of the control application code and its functional allocation to specific devices, an important point is the implementation of communication related code to exploit the underlying communication platform and realise the collaboration of the distributed control application code. Due to the real-timeliness and even time-criticality of control applications, the correct handling of realtime constraints has to be considered. This paper presents two approaches for integrating communication related code into distributed control application code. One integration method is based on the application of AspectJ, an extension for aspect-oriented programming with Java, and the other method is based on ordinary object orientation applying standard design patterns. This work is part of the research project TORERO, which was funded by the European Commission under the IST program