Design of IEC 61131-3 function blocks using SysML

UML is almost inevitable when dealing with software designing and intends to be extended to cover many different disciplines. At the same time, control and automation designers integrate further object oriented concepts in their traditional programming behaviors in particular with Function Blocks. Whereas UML was not adapted to model these IEC 61131 compliant items, an important extension called SysML has been proposed. This paper deals with evaluating the new modeling abilities of this language according to programmable logical controllers specific programming rules.