Enabling Automated Timing Verification: A Unified Approach for Industrial Distributed Control Systems

In a correct control system, events are never late, nor are they early. They are delivered precisely when the engineer means to. IEC 61499 defines a modeling language for control software of distributed systems. However, timing requirements cannot be specified as part of an application model. As a result, deriving timing specifications for components is a separate and additional manual, i. e., non-automatized, step when designing a correct system. Contract-based design is a widely known approach for correct-by-construction system design. This work presents concepts and tool support for integrating timing specifications into IEC 61499 based on the MULTIC timing specification language. We applied our approach to a demonstration example to illustrate developing IEC 61499 systems following contract- based design. Any specified contracts are stored as part of sub- applications, which are a hierarchical structuring mechanism of IEC 61499. The resulting models can form the input for continuous timing verification of IEC 61499 models.