A Real-Time-Linux-Based Framework for Model-Driven Engineering in Control and Automation

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is proposed as the next revolution in embedded-system development. It is a promising paradigm that provides the developer the abstraction level required to focus on the specific application and not on the underlying computing environments. Real-time (RT) Linux variants constitute a mature and stable platform that can be considered a strong candidate for RT applications in the control and automation domain. In this paper, a framework for the MDE of industrial automation systems is presented. This framework exploits the following: 1) the function block, a well-known paradigm in the industrial automation domain, to provide the control engineer with the ability to construct its systems as aggregations of existing components and 2) the real-time Linux to execute the automatically synthesized executable. A prototype runtime environment is described, and a laboratory example application using a robotic arm is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework. Performance measurements are very promising, even for hard RT control applications.