Developing a PLC-friendly state machine model: lessons learned

Wim Pessemier; Geert Deconinck; Gert Raskin; Philippe Saey; Hans Van Winckel

doi:10.1117/12.2054881

18 July 2014 Developing a PLC-friendly state machine model: lessons learned

Wim Pessemier, Geert Deconinck, Gert Raskin, Philippe Saey, Hans Van Winckel

Proceedings Volume 9152, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III; 915208 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054881
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Modern Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) have become an attractive platform for controlling real-time aspects of astronomical telescopes and instruments due to their increased versatility, performance and standardization. Likewise, vendor-neutral middleware technologies such as OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) have recently demonstrated that they can greatly facilitate the integration of these industrial platforms into the overall control system. Many practical questions arise, however, when building multi-tiered control systems that consist of PLCs for low level control, and conventional software and platforms for higher level control. How should the PLC software be structured, so that it can rely on well-known programming paradigms on the one hand, and be mapped to a well-organized OPC UA interface on the other hand? Which programming languages of the IEC 61131-3 standard closely match the problem domains of the abstraction levels within this structure? How can the recent additions to the standard (such as the support for namespaces and object-oriented extensions) facilitate a model based development approach? To what degree can our applications already take advantage of the more advanced parts of the OPC UA standard, such as the high expressiveness of the semantic modeling language that it defines, or the support for events, aggregation of data, automatic discovery, ... ? What are the timing and concurrency problems to be expected for the higher level tiers of the control system due to the cyclic execution of control and communication tasks by the PLCs? We try to answer these questions by demonstrating a semantic state machine model that can readily be implemented using IEC 61131 and OPC UA. One that does not aim to capture all possible states of a system, but rather one that attempts to organize the course-grained structure and behaviour of a system. In this paper we focus on the intricacies of this seemingly simple task, and on the lessons that we’ve learned during the development process of such a “PLC-friendly” state machine model.

Citation Download Citation

Wim Pessemier, Geert Deconinck, Gert Raskin, Philippe Saey, and Hans Van Winckel "Developing a PLC-friendly state machine model: lessons learned", Proc. SPIE 9152, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy III, 915208 (18 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054881

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