A Tool Integration Framework for Industrial Distributed Control Systems

This paper presents a tool integration approach for supporting the development cycle of industrial distributed control applications. The core of the approach is a formal model of the application that expresses separately the functionality of the control system from the implementation issues. The modeling language selected is XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and the framework proposed makes use of XML technologies for achieving the integration of the tools involved within the development cycle. Following this approach, a set of tools from different domain of expertise (control engineering, software engineering, configuration, maintenance...) have been integrated into a framework. The toolset has been used for designing and validating the distributed control system of a heat treatment line.