System requirements in industrial automation

Abstract

Current engineering tools for control software development of Industrial Automation Systems (IASs) are no longer capable of dealing with the architectural demands they entail. Increasingly-complex control software architectures make developers look for more efficient modeling methodologies to deal with such complexity. This paper discusses modeling gaps by focusing on the requirements analysis and architectural/detailed design stages of the IASs. It argues for having a good requirements notation on models to order to lead developers to end up in right control software for IASs. Following this hypothesis, the objective of this paper is to review existing modeling methodologies and technologies for control software architectures from factory automation and high-integrity systems. Thus, weaknesses and strengths can be identified in the industrial automation domain but also modeling capabilities from other domains can be added. This paper reveals modeling gaps given by what current approaches can provide and what is needed. It also discusses a mitigation way to close the above gap.