Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2007) 35:527–540
DOI 10.1007/s00170-007-1127-4
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Automatic generation of PLC automation projects
from component-based models
Elisabet Estévez & Marga Marcos & Darío Orive
Received: 9 January 2007 / Accepted: 12 June 2007 / Published online: 18 July 2007
# Springer-Verlag London Limited 2007
Abstract Industrial process measurement and control sys-
tems (IPMCS) are used in most of the industrial sectors
to achieve production improvement, process optimization
and time and cost reduction. Integration, reuse, flexibility and
optimization are demanded to adapt to a rapidly changing and
competitive market. In order to achieve these goals, the use of
standards in the application field, methodologies for defining
the application design and tools for supporting the develop-
ment cycle are needed. This paper proposes a component-
based model of the implementation of the control system
under design (the hardware and software architectures). The
software architecture is defined to follow the software model
of the IEC 61131-3 standard for programming programmable
logic controllers and the hardware architecture is composed
by equipment characterised by vendor and range of product.
The proposed modelling is implemented as a markup
language that allows to describe models of industrial control
systems (icsML). From the application model, described in
the markup language, the automation project for every
programmable logic controller (PLC) present in the applica-
tion is automatically generated.
Keywords Industrial control systems . Component-based
modelling . Model-driven development . IEC 61131-3 .
XML technologies
E. Estévez (*) : M. Marcos : D. Orive
Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering,
University of the Basque Country,
Alda Urquijo S/N,
48013 Bilbao, Spain
e-mail: elisabet.estevez@ehu.es
M. Marcos
e-mail: marga.marcos@ehu.es
D. Orive
e-mail: dario.orive@ehu.es
1 Introduction
Industrial control systems are a special type of computer
system that control physical devices by means of control logic
and sequences. Besides, they usually have to respond to
external events coming from the environment they control.
They use programmable logic controllers (PLCs), industrial
communication systems (fieldbus), and dedicated I/O devices
to meet the operational requirements. As a computer system,
its design deals with the definition of the software architecture,
which implements the control strategies. Traditionally, each
control equipment vendor offered a development system
based on proprietary software architecture and programming
languages. To promote the use of standards for this application
field, international organisations are making a huge effort.
PLCOpen [1] was founded in 1992 and it is a vendor- and
product-independent worldwide association whose mission
is to be the leading association resolving topics related to
control programming to support the use of international
standards in this field. The International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC) promotes open systems to be used in the
industrial control field. The IEC 61131-3 standard [2, 3]
proposes a software model and programming languages for
industrial process measurement and control systems
(IPMCS). Most of the PLC manufacturers are aiming to
become IEC 61131-3 standard compliant. PLCopen has
defined different compliance levels (base and conformity)
and many companies are certified. For instance, Schneider
Electric, Rockwell Automation ICS Triplex ISaGRAF,
Infoteam, KW Software, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic,
and Smart Software Solutions, among others. The Automa-
tion Alliance [4] is constituted by companies of the
automation industry such as ABB or WAGO, whose
hardware devices are all programmed with the same IEC
61131-3 programming system [5]. Most of them, among
other manufacturers, belong to the PLCopen organisation.
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As the industry reaches a greater maturity level and
applications increase in complexity, a consolidation of
methodologies, which allow system description and definition
before its construction, becomes necessary. In [6], an
interesting review of the information systems and production
system environments is presented. It also shows how the
information system methodologies have been transferred to
production systems. The application of consolidated infor-
mation systems technologies and methodologies to produc-
tion systems is still a current practice. In this sense,
component-based software engineering (CBSE) is a relative-
ly new software engineering approach that has been proven
to be very powerful in the design of software intensive
systems [7, 8]. In [9] a component technology specifically for
field devices is proposed. Other interesting work is described
in [10], where a model for prediction and consistency
checking of extra-functional properties relevant to distributed
real-time control-systems is developed and implemented.
This paper deals with applying the CBSE concepts to
define a component-based approach as applied to industrial
control systems. Components and connectors for defining
the hardware and software architectures are identified, as
well as the composition rules they must fulfilled in order to
describe industrial control applications. The component-
based approach is implemented as a markup language.
XML technologies [11, 12] have been used not only for
defining the elements of the language but also for
implementing the check rules that assure the fulfilment of
the constraints imposed by the architectural style. Finally,
related XML technologies are used for filtering, processing
and formatting the complete application model in order to
generate the automation project for the target commercial
tool. Different cases arise depending on the target tool
storage format. The steps to follow and the different XML
technologies for every case are presented.
Section 2 is devoted to related work aiming at modelling
industrial control applications. In Sect. 3, a novel approach
for modelling industrial control application is proposed, in
terms of hardware and software components and connec-
tors. In Sect. 4 a markup language for describing such type
of applications is proposed. Section 5 details the automatic
generation of the automation project from the application
model. Finally, the conclusions section points out future
extensions of this work. In particular, the use of other XML
technologies that could be used for developing a model
based framework aiming at integrating the tools involved in
the design of industrial control applications.
2 Related work
The component based strategy aims at managing complex-
ity, shortening time to-market, and reducing maintenance
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2007) 35:527–540
requirements by building systems with existing components
and connectors. Some attempts have been done by different
authors towards the use of well-known modelling lan-
guages for designing industrial process measurement
control systems (IPMCS). [13, 14] propose the use of the
unified modelling language (UML) [15, 16] for specifying
components of control systems following the IEC 61131-3
standard. Both approaches apply Object-Oriented technol-
ogy to model industrial automation applications. However,
it is not clear if the resulting models are analysed in terms
of consistency of POUs (program organization units)
functionality modelled in UML. Furthermore, the papers
do not explain if these models could be imported from a
PLC programming tool in order to download the automa-
tion project onto the target. In [17] a model-based approach
is proposed that uses two views to describe the design of
manufacturing systems: the conceptual view and the control
engineer view. They also use UML to guide the design of
the system. In particular, they analyse the system behaviour
before its implementation using the potentiality of UML
diagrams. But, they do not support automatic code
generation.
There are other works that focus on the design of
applications using the IEC 61131 standard. [18] proposes a
methodology for the analysis and modelling of discrete
event systems applied to the development of the control
logic based on the IEC 61131-3 standard. This methodol-
ogy is offered jointly with a tool that provides an IEC
61131-3 program expressing the execution control of the
application.
Related to distributed industrial control systems, the
evolving IEC 61499 standard [19, 20] is being discussed as
a successor of the IEC 61131 standard. Currently, there is a
great interest in analyzing the influence of the new standard
in industry, as well as its convergence with the IEC 61131-3
standard. Several groups are focussed their research in this
topic. [21] discusses the role of the IEC 61499 in the
factory automation and analyses the current on going
research by several groups. [22–24] describe a framework
called CORFU (common object-oriented real-time frame-
work for the unified development of industrial control
systems application) that defines an industrial process-
control protocol for the development, distribution, and
operation of such type of applications based on IEC 61499
Function Blocks. The design is object oriented and uses
UML to define a 4-layered architecture for designing such
type of systems [25].
There are very few commercial-off-the-shelf-tools that
are IEC 61499 compliant. In fact, only ISaGRAF® PLC
programming tool [26] announces it is.
However, nowadays most of the PLC manufacturers
offer programming tools that follow the IEC 61131-3
standard, and in most cases, they provide a proprietary