Model Driven Engineering for Building Automation, a Research Agenda

This paper introduces a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) development process for building automation applications. Currently, those applications are often written for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) in one of the supported modeling languages such as structured text, ladder diagrams and grafcets. The consequences of this approach are that (1) PLC experts are needed to develop the application, (2) it is difficult to verify the application´s correctness and (3) when introducing other technologies such as embedded micro controllers, even more experts are needed. This paper proposes an MDE development process that addresses these problems. The use of a domain specific language eliminates the need for PLC experts, and developers can concentrate on the development of the building automation application. Models of the system or a transformation of those models to Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS), State chart, or Causal Block Diagram (CBD) formalisms can be used to verify, simulate and optimize the application based on user needs. In a last step, the code for the target platforms can be generated directly from the verified and optimized models.