Applying performance analysis concepts for event-based industrial automation systems

The growing complexity of today´s industrial systems motivates many researchers to utilize Event-Based Industrial Automation Systems (EBIAS) that enable to flexibly integrate heterogeneous components. However, developers of EBIAS lack efficient methods to verify the non-functional reliability of such systems. This methodological gap complicates the design of complex commercial systems with strict performance requirements. This manuscript (i) describes existing problems and proposes to tackle it with performance modeling, (ii) introduces and compares four performance modeling notations, and (iii) illustrates the approach on a use case dealing with integration of an application designed according to the IEC 61499 distributed automation standard interacting with a SCADA environment in an event-based manner.