Generating and validating product instances in IEC 61131–3 from feature models

Organizations developing control software are faced with the problem of supporting an increasing number of customer options, while the cost of software development needs to be decreased. Feature modeling is a technique for describing mandatory, optional and alternative software features of a product line, so that customer-specific product instances may be derived by selecting among optional and alternative features. Validation of product instances is needed to ensure that none of the rules regarding mandatory, optional, alternative, required or excluded features are violated. An approach for feature modeling, product configuration and code generation is proposed for machine control applications using IEC 61131-3. The approach is supported by a toolset exploiting object oriented extensions to IEC 61131-3 and the PLCopen XML import/export schema.