Developing control logic using aspect-oriented programming and sequence planning

A fundamental functionality of a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) is to control and execute a set of operations. But a large part of the program code is more involved in supporting the user with concerns like alarm, HMI, communication, safety and manual control. Code related to these supporting concerns is often tangled with operation execution code, the core concerns, which makes it hard to reuse.This paper describes a method to reuse code and functionality when developing PLC programs and code libraries. The method proposes that core concerns are planned with a software tool called Sequence Planner, and the supporting concerns are integrated into the core concerns with a tool based on aspect-oriented programming.