The Post Language: Process-Oriented Extension for IEC 61131-3 Structured Text

This paper introduces a new programming language for control software specification. The language called poST is a process-oriented extension of the IEC 61131-3 Structured Text language widely used in the PLC domain. The poST language enables control software specification as a set of interacting FSM-based processes that have event-driven behaviour and operate with time intervals. The language is intended to provide a possibility to use the process-oriented approach for IEC 61131-3 users and comparing to the other process-oriented languages poST is easy to learn for the IEC 61131-3 community. An IDE for poST was developed with Eclipse (Xtext) toolset. Paper illustrates the poST language using for a hand dryer control software: we provide the source poST code and the generated C code for Arduino (ATmega 168) platform.