Towards an automated verification process for industrial safety applications

Author

Thramboulidis, Kleanthis ; Soliman, Doaa ; Frey, Georg

fYear

2011

Firstpage

482

Lastpage

487

Abstract

Legacy systems that do not conform to the norms and regulations imposed by recent safety standards have to be upgraded to meet safety requirements. In this paper, we describe a methodology to upgrade legacy industrial applications based on the IEC61131 function block model without the need to redesign the whole application. We then describe an approach for automating the verification process of safety applications that is based on the use of the UPPAAL simulation and verification platform for embedded real-time systems. The meta-models of the source and target domains are presented and a transformation process of the PLCopen XML design specification to UPPAAL XML specification is described. A laboratory system is used as a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed process.

Keywords

IEC standards; XML; control engineering computing; formal specification; formal verification; programmable controllers; safety; safety systems; software maintenance; software standards; IEC 61131 function block model; PLCopen XML design specification; UPPAAL XML specification; UPPAAL simulation; automated verification process; domain metamodel; embedded real-time system; industrial safety application; legacy industrial application upgrade; legacy system; safety requirements; safety standards; transformation process; Hazards; Input variables; Libraries; Software; Standards; XML;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2011 IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Trieste

ISSN

2161-8070

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-1730-7

Electronic_ISBN

2161-8070

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CASE.2011.6042451

Filename

6042451