An MDD process for IEC 61131-based industrial automation systems

Model Driven Development (MDD) has been proved as a quite successful paradigm in general-purpose computing and is currently exploited in the embedded systems domain. On the other hand, the majority of industrial automation systems is developed based on the IEC 61131 standard. This standard defines a model and a set of programming languages for the development of industrial automation software and it is supported by the majority of the commercial tools in this domain. This work proposes an MDD process to increase the productivity and reliability of the development process of industrial automation systems. Piping and instrumentation diagrams are considered as source of requirements for process control engineering and SysML is used to reduce the gap between these diagrams and the 61131 based design specs of the control system. The foundation for a SysML profile to facilitate the exploitation of SysML in this domain is described. This profile will allow the developer to work in higher layers of abstraction than the one supported by IEC 61131 and effectively move from requirement specifications into the implementation model of the system.