Graphical representation of factory automation Markup Languages

Current industrial applications demand the design of more and more complex, safe and trustworthy control systems which exhibit a high degree of flexibility and reutilization. Therefore, the engineering process has to be improved through the integration of the tools involved in the development process. To achieve this goal the definition of Markup Languages for factory automation has been proposed at different layers of the engineering process. This work goes a step further and it proposes to use related XML technologies for filtering, processing and formatting the application model expressed in XML in order to visualize the graphical information. A methodology describing the steps to follow to achieve this goal is presented. It is illustrated for the graphical languages of the IEC 61131-3 standard for PLC programming.