Model-Driven design of Industrial Control Systems

Industrial Control Systems 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. There is also a growing requirement that all software tools that support the different phases of the development process (design, configuration, management) can be integrated as well. Thus, a consolidation of modeling methodologies for achieving this goal is needed. This paper proposes a Model-driven approach based on different views of the application (control engineering, electric engineering and software engineering views) for designing industrial control systems. The approach is based on the definition of a description language that includes the description of the three domain views and their relationships. In particular, XML schema technology is used to define the architectural style and schematron technology to implement the composition rules.