Generating an Object Oriented IEC 61131-3 software product line architecture from SysML

The software product line has emerged as a successful paradigm for offering a broad range of customer options with decreased development time and cost. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is used for architecture design and object oriented languages are used for implementation. In industrial automation, targets programmed with function block languages need to be supported, so the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is appropriate for architecture design. In this paper, the SysML block definition diagram has been extended to support software product line architecture design. The XMI data format is used as source for mapping the architecture to Object Oriented IEC 61131-3 software in the PLCopen XML format. The methodology and supporting tools are demonstrated on a mobile elevating work platform product line.