IEC 61499 based model-driven process control engineering

In process control engineering, most requirements for the control system are conventionally specified in piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs). The process design and control requests captured in P&IDs are manually interpreted and then implemented in process automation software. This manual development highly relies on multi-disciplinary expertise and becomes laborious and error-prone for complex systems. This paper reports a study on applying model-driven approach to facilitate the engineering workflow from P&IDs to control software. The foundations of this work are the IEC 62424 standard, which bridges the gap of information exchange between process design and control engineering, and the IEC 61499 standard, which provides the distributed control architecture for process measurement and automation. The model transformation pathway from IEC 62424 P&ID to IEC 61499 application has been formally defined and then demonstrated on a case-study water heating system for a three-floor building.