A New Approach to Control Systems Software Development

The chapter is devoted to the software engineering of large-scale control and automation systems for programmable logic controller platforms. The classes of these control systems typically involve hundreds or thousands of signals, dozens of control loops, and have to cope with the hybrid nature of the processes. Interestingly, the complexity of the development, operation and maintenance of the software for such kinds of systems is not so much associated with basic control (maintenance of the desired state of the process), but much more with so-called procedural control (performing a sequence of activities that ensure proper operation of the system or process). The emphasis of the chapter is on the presentation of a model-driven engineering approach to procedural control software development. The main element of the approach is ProcGraph, an original domain-specific modelling language which enables the construction of high-level specifications (software models). The other important element of the approach is an integrated development environment consisting of the model repository, the graphical model editor and the code generator. The integrated development environment enables the creation and editing of ProcGraph models and their automatic transformation into the programmable logic controller software. As an application example, the control system of a calcinate-grinding process is considered, which is one of the sub-processes in the large and complex process of producing titanium dioxide.