Reinhard Hametner

Thales Group, Austria · Base Systems - TAS Platform

In this paper, we address the question of how SIL4 railway applications within on-premise cloud environments can communicate safely with internal and external systems. The EN 50159 standard is the railway standard applicable for safety-related communication. For IT/OT Security IEC 62443 can be considered. Most standardized protocols developed accor...

Programming parallel applications on replicated architectures in the safety-critical field is challenging due to the inherent non-determinism of the derived applications. This paper describes the concept of asynchronous programming with futures in C under a safety-critical platform used in the transport automation industry. A C language extension n...

To cope with the need for flexibility of industrial applications, and other customer related requirements, functional control behavior is shifted from hardware to software. This leads to higher software complexity. Therefore, testing of industrial software is a key technique to ensure overall system quality. Based on an analysis of testing approach...

Abstract In today’s world the complexity of industrial automation systems increases rapidly. Because of this complexity, the development of such automation sys- tems becomes more time consuming and has to deal with adaptations of the industrial automation code on short notice. The engineering efficiency has to be increased in terms of reusability s...

The need for increasing flexibility of industrial automation system products leads to the trend of shifting functional behavior from hardware solutions to software components. This trend causes an increasing complexity of software components and the need for comprehensive and automated testing approaches to ensure a required (high) quality level. N...

Considering the disassembly as a vital and prospective industry domain, we use the mobile robots to automate the disassembly process. In our system, each mobile robot has particular skills and is supervised by an agent with related objectives and knowledge. An agent has an ontology-based world model, which is responsible to maintain the knowledge a...

The integration of closed loop control algorithms into industrial control systems represents an important topic in the automation domain. Timing constraints have to be taken into account, often leading to a compromise between real-time capabilities of the control and accuracy of the calculated values. Due to its event-based execution model, IEC 614...

In the field of industrial automation systems software becomes an important factor because engineers tend to move the realization of functional requirements from hardware to software components. The main reason for this is that software components allow increasing product flexibility. As a consequence software complexity increases rapidly and requi...

Mobile robots can be used as a motivating and interesting tool to perform laboratory experiments within the context of mechatronics, microelectronics and control. Considering the disassembly as a vital and prospective industry domain, we use the mobile robots to automate the disassembly process. In our system, each mobile robot has particular skill...

The need for increasing flexibility of industrial automation system products leads to the trend to shift functional behavior from hardware solutions to software components. This trend causes an increasing complexity of software components and the need for comprehensive and automated testing approaches to ensure a requested quality level. Neverthele...

Operating industrial plants at their maximum energy and resources efficiency often means to operate them close at their design limits. Due to strict safety and process parameter constraints, it is challenging to control them close to the optimal setpoints. Currently process performance improvement projects are realized by application of PC based mo...

An increasing number of functionality in today’s machine and plant automation is being shifted from pure mechanics or electronics into software. Therefore the system behavior must be checked for compliance with the demanded software functionality by software tests. The precondition for test case execution is a start state, the system has to take in...

Traditional control application engineering tech- niques tend to mix logical functionality with hardware access methods. This greatly impedes reusability. Through separation of the logical control application domain and the specific hardware domain the MDA (Model-Driven Architecture) pro- poses a solution to this problem. In the domain of embedded...

Current component-based approaches for distributed control systems enable the reuse of mechatronic components, for example specific grippers or conveyor belts, but do not allow full application reuse as the actual hardware configuration is an implicit part of the software solution. In contrast to the current object-oriented or component-based engin...

Test-driven development (TDD) - an established approach in business IT software development - enables test case generation based on models early in the development process. Applying TDD and models in automation systems engineering (ASE) can increase testing effectiveness and efficiency. A key question is which models are suitable for ASE applicatio...

Increasing complexity of software components in automation systems require systematic and frequent testing approaches. Test-First Development (TFD) - an established approach in business IT software development - promises to support test automation in automation systems development. Nevertheless, linking test case generation, execution, and reportin...

The increasing complexity of automation applications needs a new framework architecture to develop automation control systems. This paper shows a workflow for engineering and maintenance applications in the automation control system domain. A new component architecture is specified which supports component-oriented design, reusability, and encapsul...

Software components provide an increasing part of added value in automation systems and become more complex to construct and test. Test-driven development (TDD) of software systems has been successfully used for agile development of business software systems. Test cases guide the system implementation and can be executed automatically after softwar...

Since distribution of control applications, exchangeability as well as modularization becomes more and more important for the creation of flexible and competitive automation systems we analyze a concept which is supposed to provide these properties. The presented concept is based on a model-driven transformation of IEC 61131-3 projects into IEC 614...

Automation systems software must provide sufficient diagnosis information for testing to enable early defect detection and quality measurement. However, in many automation systems the aspects of automation, testing, and diagnosis are intertwined in the code. This makes the code harder to read, modify, and test. In this paper we introduce the design...