Towards automated deployment of IEC 61131-3 applications on multi-core systems

Abstract

The IEC 61131-3 standard, a widely used standard in the automation industry, defines various programming languages for programmable logic controllers. Today, the open source tools that comply with this standard do not support deployment of the applications on multi-core platforms. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-step approach that aims to support automatic deployment of the automation control applications, developed using the IEC 61131-3 standard, to multi-core platforms. In the first step, the generated sequential code is partitioned. In the second step, the partitioned code is allocated to tasks while the tasks are mapped to various cores, without violating the dependencies, synchronization and communication constraints in the application. In order to provide a proof of concept, we develop a prototype by extending an existing tool that complies with the standard. We also perform a case study and a preliminary evaluation of the prototype.