Generation of Inter-PLC Communication in Distributed Control Systems Using IEC 61499

While engineering distributed control systems, the implementation of the underlying communication interaction is a tedious and error-prone task. Some existing approaches to overcome this issue propose using generic interfaces to abstract the implementation and communication details. We reuse the information from these interfaces to automatically synthesize the required communication infrastructure. To demonstrate this idea, we implement the generation of the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) code in IEC 61499, enabling the network communication for the distributed control applications. As a result, the prototype generation tool is capable of creating the PLC code according to the specification, provided by a service interface of a component. We examine the applicability of the approach on a small use case, generating a communication logic for a distributed control application.