Improving program flexibility and application engineering for decentralized control in factory automation

Application engineers in industrial automation require on the one hand robust pre-defined and tested modules with guaranteed functionality. On the other hand, there is also significant need - especially in decentralized architectures - for freely programmable user-specific functionalities. This paper describes mechanisms and solutions that address these requirements. Additionally, an architecture is described, that allows to create a software platform for efficient engineering of control applications for industrial control.