Increasing control application reusability through generic device configuration model

Abstract

Nowadays it is desirable to operate flexible production plants, where products can be produced in various individual designs. As a result, more functionality needs to be integrated into existing control systems, which rapidly increases the complexity of the control applications and brings the programmable logic controllers to their limits. Unfortunately, control applications are hardly reusable for other platforms. Increasing the reusability of control applications is, therefore, an important task, which can be achieved by a strict separation of control logic and hardware configuration. Current standards lack this separation, as there is usually hardware dependent software on the application level. This paper introduces a generic device configuration model, applicable to common standards in the industrial automation domain. With this model, it is shown how to control applications can specify generic I/O requirements which are then linked to the specific I/Os during the final deployment of the specific control devices.