Simulation-Based Development of Safety Related Interlocks

Dynamic simulations could support in several ways the industrial automation and control systems development, including their interlocking functions, which constitute an important and tedious part of the development. In this paper, we present a tool-supported, automated approach for creating simulation models of controlled systems and their interlocking functions based on UML AP models of control systems and ModelicaML models of the systems to be controlled. The purpose of the approach is to facilitate manual development work related to model-based development of control systems and to enable early testing and comparison of control and interlocking strategies. The tools and the techniques are demonstrated with an example modelling project and the paper also discusses extending the approach to verifiable safety systems including their security aspects.