A Design Pattern for Monitoring Adapter Connections in IEC 61499

Abstract

Today's software developments are frequently structured into different components with well defined interfaces. IEC 61499 comes with well defined interface mechanisms such as adapters that group data and event exchange between different subsystems. Compliance with interface specifications can be monitored at run-time. In this paper we present a design pattern to monitor adapters thereby observing whether communication specifications are fulfilled. We present an example demonstrating monitoring of a handshaking mechanism used between control application components.

Runtime Enforcement for IEC 61499 Applications

“…A runtime verification technique is proposed in [12]. The authors propose a method for monitoring adapter connections in IEC 61499 application.…”

“…Furthermore, as previously mentioned, industrial applications often interact with nondeterministic behaviours of the environments, which can not be observed during design time. The work in [5] and [12] propose alternative methods to verify IEC 61499 applications by applying runtime verification techniques [7]. The main idea of both works is to integrate a monitor that can check during runtime whether some properties hold.…”

Monitoring design pattern for distributed automation systems in IEC 61499 and its formal modelling

“…The monitor design pattern has been recently introduced in the IEC 61499 context by [14]. This work raises the question of how the monitors shall be developed based on the given requirements and how their correctness could be verified.…”

“…As stated by [14], the idea behind monitoring is to observe a particular consistency condition and raise a violation event or automatically take over a situation violating the consistency conditions.…”