A component-based approach for supporting functional and non-functional analysis in control loop design

One of the main issues in developing modern control systems is how to design control loops in such a way that functional requirements as well as real-time attributes can be analyzed during designtime. Nowadays, control loops are often constructed performing a modular approach by means of libraries of building blocks that can be considered as components of a control system. Although component models that support predictability of the system behavior there exist, they are found to be inappropriate for the control systems application domain. In fact, they assume to not deal with control loops (i.e., control flow feedbacks) which cause problems with predictability of the system behavior. This has lead to a real need of a component-based approach for designing control loops and supporting predictability of the behavior of the designed system. In this paper, we present a possible component-based approach for supporting functional and non-functional analysis of control loops during design-time. Moreover, we outline an overall view of the component-based development framework which implements our approach.