Component-based and model-driven design of industrial automation systems
Special Session: "Component-based and model-driven design of industrial automation systems"
Today's production processes will be performed more and more by automated machines as the level of automation increases steadily. The main trend in industrial automation is the increasing need for customized and individualized plants. The production lines have to be constructed and adapted to new production processes quickly. Such highly automated systems are mainly con-trolled by embedded hard- and software which are heterogeneous in nature. Heterogeneous speci-fication and heterogeneous architectures lead to a tremendous increase in the design complexity. The software engineering costs will increase up to 80% of the overall systems costs in the next 15 years (currently this ratio is about 50%). In addition, the automation and control engineering of a production plant takes a huge amount of time. Especially in the industrial sector, each plant or system can be seen as a prototype. The need is to evolve the automation solutions in response to: rapidly changing demands due to new production processes; the evolution of hard- and software into more and more complex forms. The design methods and approaches used depend strongly on the application field. This means that different automation and control systems have to work to-gether to perform automation and control tasks.
Design and engineering of such heterogeneous systems is tricky and needs the knowledge from different domains during all phases of development. During the design phase, the system com-plexity, the domain/platform dependence and the design time are the critical factors.
One of the main current design trends in automation and control systems is to put automation components, blocks made of hardware, software and intellectual property (like algorithms and data structures), together. This in turn calls for common, language independent models for representing, saving and reusing such components.
The following topics should be presented within this Special Session:
- Model-driven design of automation and control systems
- Component-based design of automation and control systems
- Automatic code generation
- Automatio objects/components
- Simulation
- Executable models
- Formal verification
