Work-in-Progress: Modeling of real-time communication for industrial distributed automation systems

Abstract

Real-time communication of distributed automation systems come with many challenges as there is no common time basis. Often a periodic execution of applications is considered which leads to time phenomena like drifts or jitter. Thus, this type of communication requires observance and enforcement of real-time properties to guarantee reliability of distributed systems. New industrial technologies like Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and the IEC 61499 standard provide support to conquer upcoming challenges. Therefore, we are using these jointly with contract-based design to propose a design methodology for verification of real-time communication in IEC 61499 systems. We implemented a simulation-based verification environment and performed postmortem trace-based verification against timing specifications. The evaluation confirms the possibility of integrating our proposed representation for non-local communication into IEC 61499 for analyzing time behavior of applications.