Real-time modeling for industrial control systems

This paper presents a temporal characterization of the IEC 61131-3 standard for automation software. The final goal is to apply schedulability analysis to industrial distributed control systems to assure they meet timing non functional requirements. This characterization has been performed in the context of a Model Driven Design approach previously proposed by the authors. The approach defines three Domain Specific Models: control specification and hardware and software architectures. The software model uses the PLCopen XML interface for expressing IEC 61131-3 automation projects. The information contained in the whole application model is processed to generate the temporal model of the application. Schedulability analysis is achieved by generating the temporal model of the well-known Modeling and Analysis Suite for Real-Time Applications, MAST.