Distributed implementation of Grafcets through IEC 61499

Abstract

A Grafcet is a standardized model for describing the behavior of systems which is popular among automation engineers. As the Grafcet standard excludes implementation details, the models are typically translated to automation software. Such software was traditionally programmed in one of the languages specified in IEC 61131-3. Nowadays, automation software is increasingly modelled in IEC 61499 which facilitates designing distributed control systems. In this paper, we define a standardized translation methodology, so that automation engineers can benefit from the advantages of IEC 61499 while continuing to use Grafcet. We discuss the differences between Grafcet and IEC 61499. We translated a Grafcet model into an IEC 61499 application to illustrate the process and derive guidelines for application designers. For the core concepts of Grafcet, we present the corresponding structure in IEC 61499.

Towards facilitating software engineering for production systems in Industry 4.0 with behavior models

“…Investigating the implementation of application behavior models resulted in a structured translation approach from the specification language GRAFCET (used by system engineers) to the executable language IEC 61499 (used by software engineers) [18,47]. The identified translation patterns retain hierarchical structures and cover operation mode switching, which is also used for error handling (Best Paper Award for Factory Automation at the IEEE ETFA 2020 for [18]). The results can be generalized to other state-based models.…”

“…Also the Systems Modeling Language (SysML, [21]) has been applied in the automation domain with dedicated extension profiles [32,41]. SysML or the domain-specific GRAFCET [18] capture the expected behavior and structure of a full automation system, not only its software. In general, these languages are not directly executable and have therefore been applied in conjunction with executable languages, such as those defined for control software in IEC 61131-3 [39,41] or IEC 61499 [10,24,33].…”

“…Paper Title/Topic Venue Case Study RQ [46] Model-Execution Framework for IEC 61499 components IEEE ETFA'21 -1 [44] Using behavior models to guide the application structure IEEE ICPS'20 -1, 2 [28] Implementing interactions based on Activity Diagrams IEEE ETFA'21 1 1, 2 [18,47] RQ4 is evaluated by extending the implemented approach with the chosen new models. To successfully answer this question, the suggested approach has to facilitate the software engineering process.…”

Translating Grafcet Specifications Into C/Unix Program

“…E and al., 2016), (Julius.R and al., 2017), (Julius. R and al., 2019) and (Miguel-Escrig.O et al, 2020. (Remaki.Z and al., 1994) have designed the translation schemes of the grafcet in Occam2 language which is executable on transputers.…”

Modelos de Grafcet y aplicaciones distribuidas en la norma IEC 61499. Un caso de estudio

“…En particular, las ingenieras e ingenieros de control carecen de herramientas que permitan implementar, de forma sistemática, controladores para sistemas de eventos discretos a partir de las técnicas de modelado con las que están familiarizados y que utilizan para describir de una manera formal el comportamiento dinámico de los sistemas automatizados. Uno de los avances más recientes en este sentido ha sido presentados en [8] donde se propone una primera aproximación a la metodología para la implementación distribuida de modelos de Grafcet usando la IEC 61499.…”