Model-Driven Development of Distributed Automation Intelligence with IEC 61499

Abstract

In the domain of automation and control systems, the increasing use of decentralization in system architecture and the exponential growth of control complexity are drastically shifting the traditional monolithic centralized control design paradigm towards the reconfigurable distributed control engineering approaches. This trend is also reflected in the development of the IEC 61499 standard for industrial process measurement and control systems. Although the IEC 61499 standard proposes an open, component-oriented, and platformindependent software development framework for distributed automation and control systems, its industrial recognition and practice are quite limited due to the fact that apart from the design complexity of distributed systems, several core software engineering aspects of the standard are unfamiliar to most industrial practitioners and the new engineering paradigm’s practical benefits are unclear to them either. This thesis addresses these problems by proposing a model-driven engineering methodology for the modelling and generation of distributed automation intelligence. It is aimed to provide a high-level development approach of distributed control systems and the corresponding simulation model generation using IEC 61499. The prerequisites to achieve this goal are: a systematic modelling methodology, a flexible model generator, and a generic data exchange mechanism. In this thesis, automation and control systems are hierarchically modelled based on the concept of Intelligent Mechatronic Component (IMC). Each IMC is implemented as a set of IEC 61499 function blocks following the Model-View-Controller design pattern to enable closed-loop model simulation. To precisely synchronize the control logic distributed over the IMC hierarchy, the Time-Complemented Event-Driven control architecture is proposed. A knowledge-based model generator is developed to automate the generation of IMC models based on the design specifications of the automation and control systems. Finally, an XML-based mark-up language, IMCML, is designed to realize data unification among the heterogeneous tools and to support seamless data exchange during the proposed model-driven engineering process. A set of prototype tools has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the methodologies presented in this thesis. The tool set includes an IMCML editor and an IMC model generator for airport baggage handling systems, which can be easily extended and applied for the more general material handling systems. It has been shown that the ideas presented in this thesis are beneficial for existing development process and viable for practical industrial applications.