MDE of manufacturing automation software — Integrating SysML and standard development tools

In the paper, a SysML-based approach that supports the model-driven engineering (MDE) of manufacturing automation software is presented. The approach adapts the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) and defines a specialized language profile, the SysML-AT, to support automated code generation for IEC 61131-3 runtime environments. For adapted SysML Parametric Diagrams (PD), a prototypical tool support was realized inside a commonly used automation software development environment. Inside the prototypical tool, the linking between the realized PD model editor and online data from the IEC 61131-3 runtime environment enables direct debugging within a SysML-AT model. The concept was evaluated by case studies and by usability experiments, which proved the usability of the SysML-based MDE approach for future users.