Modular Verification of Function Block Based Industrial Control Systems

Abstract IEC 61131-3, the world-wide standard for industrial control programming, is increasingly being used in safety-related control applications. Control loops are built from components taken from domain-specific function block libraries. Code inspection and testing are the two predominant quality assurance techniques. For highly dependable control applications, however, these techniques are not sufficient, in general. This paper suggests to augment testing with compositional, theorem-prover supported verification. The approach is based on a representation of IEC 61131-3 function blocks in higher-order logic. The verification task is separated into the a priori verification of library components and a separate proof of individual application programs.

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