Increasing portability and reuseability of distributed control programs by I/O access abstraction

Current component-based approaches for distributed control systems enable the reuse of mechatronic components, for example specific grippers or conveyor belts, but do not allow full application reuse as the actual hardware configuration is an implicit part of the software solution. In contrast to the current object-oriented or component-based engineering models for automation engineering, this paper will introduce a new Model-Driven Architecture based application and hardware modeling approach. Through separation of the logical application domain and the specific hardware domain the logical application is completely independent of the concrete physical plant configuration. Therefore development time for automation applications can be vastly reduced and software quality can be improved.