An approach for assisting industrial application reengineering

Industrial automation applications are often reengineered to serve purposes such as reducing the load on controllers by adding additional controllers in the system, improving the throughput / performance of the application, or migrating to a new platform. We present an approach for automatically computing reengineering options for a legacy industrial automation application over an additional set of controllers. An engineer, while reengineering an application over an additional set of controllers, needs to compute the various dependencies between the modules (such as Program organization units, function blocks, statements) of the application. Additionally, he needs to consider aspects, such as, communication overhead, controller load, and geographical placement of field (input/output) devices. This is a time consuming activity when performed manually. Moreover, it is difficult to compare multiple reengineering options, on the above aspects, without some tool support. We propose an approach that automatically computes multiple reengineering options and recommends them to the engineer.