dSL, a language and environment for the design of distributed industrial controllers

We present dSL (distributed Supervision Language), a language and environment dedicated to the specification of industrial controllers. dSL extends an existing language used in the industrial world to allow transparent code distribution. We study other existing solutions, and argue for the need of dSL. Next, we define dSL syntactically and semantically, and prove some remarkable properties on its semantics. The automatic distribution introduces problems that are hard to solve for the dSL compiler/distributer, for which we give some heuristics. Since we give a precise semantics to the dSL language, formal methods can be applied to assure that controllers are correct. We show how to use explicit state model checking to perform this verification. Throughout the presentation, we introduce a set of examples showing the useability of dSL and its concepts.

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