Supporting a Model-driven Development Process for Distributed Control Software

Established development processes for industrial control systems are static and struggle to adopt changing requirements. The interdisciplinary nature of such systems necessitates carefully designed interfaces between modules and components, as well as unambiguously defined requirements. The domain-specific modeling language IEC 61499 offers potentials to accelerate design processes and to introduce a model-driven approach, in which interface and behavior models are continuously refined and reused. We investigate these potentials and outline how to apply an extended development process in which implicit expert knowledge is preserved in behavior- and interface models that are currently not retained during the development. Based on a running example, we illustrate the refinement of scenarios along the development process and show how the retained information captures the expected behavior of the environment. We identify research questions and gaps in the elicitation, maintenance and utilization of these models, in particular in the domains of model-based testing, monitoring, and reconfiguration. An accelerated development process that integrates behavior models can help making future industrial control systems more dependable, flexible, and resilient during the whole life cycle.