Improving Component Testing of Industrial Automation Software

Industrial automation systems are tested nowadays mainly via system tests at a very late stage of development. These tests are conducted manually, are time-consuming and cost-intensive. Earlier testing of automation software, e.g., component testing, is therefore desired in order to reduce the effort for system testing by detecting errors sooner. In this paper we present an improved concept for a test environment that enables developers of industrial control electronics to test the functionality of IEC 61499 software components. Components can be tested on any hardware with an IEC 61499 runtime environment, even on the target hardware. There is no need to change the automation software for testing. We propose using dynamically typed languages to implement tests because such languages have inherent properties that are useful for this task. We provide example code of a typical test case.