Comparison of Two Concepts for Planned Reuse of Variant-rich IEC 61131-3-based Control Software

In manufacturing systems, control software implements an increasing part of functionality and, thus, its planned reuse is essential to stay competitive at the global market while fulfilling requirements posed by Industrie 4.0. However, despite a variety of available strategies for planned reuse, control software is oftentimes historically grown and developed ad-hoc using copy, paste and modify. One reason for this is the high variability of control software caused for example by influences from the used hardware or customer-specific adaptations. For reuse of variant-rich control software, this paper presents two component-based strategies namely an approach utilizing the object-oriented extensions of IEC 61131-3 and an approach adopting the use of software product lines from the software engineering domain. For evaluation purposes, both concepts are implemented on a lab-sized demonstrator and compared regarding their potentials to support software reuse. Thereby, software characteristics and the usability of both approaches are taken into account.     «

In manufacturing systems, control software implements an increasing part of functionality and, thus, its planned reuse is essential to stay competitive at the global market while fulfilling requirements posed by Industrie 4.0. However, despite a variety of available strategies for planned reuse, control software is oftentimes historically grown and developed ad-hoc using copy, paste and modify. One reason for this is the high variability of control software caused for example by influences from...     »