Model-Driven Development of Control Software for Distributed Automation: A Survey and an Approach

This paper presents a survey on model-driven design and validation approaches for distributed automation and control systems with essentially decentralized logic. Driven by the goals of flexibility and performance improvement, researchers have explored several approaches to distributed systems design, including multiagent systems, middleware, and distributed component architectures. This also results in several international standards and reference architectures, such as IEC 61499, OpenRTM, IEC 61804, etc. Verification and validation of distributed systems is another grand challenge. This survey presents methods of using traditional and novel modeling and simulation tools in the context of distributed systems. In particular, this paper then focuses on the developments related to IEC 61499 standard, which displays a range of research directions that aim to fill the gaps in the distributed systems modeling, implementation, and validation.