Real-time aspects in the development of function block oriented engineering support systems

Interoperability and time-criticality are the most mandatory needs in the development process of distributed industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCS) applications. The function block (FB) concept is adopted in the development of an engineering support system (ESS) in order to address the device interoperability issue as well as to automate the development process and increase reusability. Apart from exploiting FBs provided by intelligent field devices, and assigning functionality to the different field devices, these FB-oriented ESSs must deal with the real-time nature of IPMCSs. In the context of this work, we define a common field device model using Unified Modelling Language (UML). This model, combined with a 4-layer IPMCS architecture, constitutes a framework that facilitates the application of ESS functionality in order to guarantee real-timeliness of the final system.