Automatic alarm handling generation for industrial automation systems

The alarm handling, performed in a modular formal design, is considered in the context of the industrial automation systems. The aim is to provide a methodology based on the formal modeling of the logic control functions able to generate alarm events whenever a generic fault occurs. Furthermore the control system is automatically endowed with the capability to identify the faults and recover them, by an alarm event analysis. The identification problem is faced here by a comparison between the expected and actual sensor values, for every possible state of the controlled equipment. The main contribution of the paper consists of the automatic synthesis algorithm for the alarm handling. Although the approach has only been developed for the pallet transportation system for machining centers, the results can be easily extended to the overall system. The modular finite state machine approach has been adopted here for the modeling of the control modules