Component-based control system

In industrial automation it is usual to reuse many well-defined hardware components. The use of these hardware components helps to reduce the price considerably. In this paper we introduce an approach to build industrial control software from software components in order to achieve the same benefits as those of the hardware reuse. Component systems are more flexible, extensible, portable and therefore a promising contribution to the current state of software engineering. A model with different types of components and relationships between components is introduced. This onion skin-like model classifies the components in core components and peripheral components. Although the presented model fits very well for the development and reuse of component-oriented systems in the world of industrial control systems with its standardized hardware components it may also be applied in other application domains such as business applications or distributed systems