A tool supported engineering process for developing control applications

Engineers in industrial and control sector continuously face problems on developing modern distributed industrial control applications. The latest standard in this domain, the IEC61499, defines a methodology to be used by system designers to construct distributed industrial control applications. New generation Engineering Support Systems (ESSs) are required to support the whole development process. In this paper, a process that introduces new and enhances already defined phases of the IEC61499 development process is presented. Model Driven Development has been adopted and two meta-models have been defined: a Unified Modelling Language (UML) based one that is used in the analysis phase and an IEC61499 based for the design phase. A set of transformation rules, formally defined by means of UML's Object Constraint Language, is defined to ameliorate the transformation process between the two metamodels. The proposed development process is supported by a prototype ESS, namely CORFU ESS, which is used to present a case study.