Improving the software engineering of brew house plants by modularizing the control software

Abstract The development of control software for automation plants is a time-consuming task. With a modular structure of the control software, which is derived from a functional decomposition of plant and process, this paper presents an alternative approach to the widely used procedure “Copy, paste, modify” of the control software of a similar plant. The approach is applied on batch process plants, in particular 2-vessel brew house plants. Their plant topologies are modularized with regard to hardware, process and control. Based on the established modular structure of the plant control, software modules are developed. Generating the control software of new plants from an assembly of these software modules will reduce implementation effort and improve software reusability. As a proof of concept, a prototypical test plant is constructed and run with control software, which was automatically generated from a prototypical tool implementation.