Hierarchical control architectures in industrial automation: a design approach based on the generalized actuator concept

A model-driven approach to automated diagnosis of industrial distributed I/O systems based on fieldbus technologies

“…As a final remark, most of the considerations made on the GD model could be reclaimed in order to extend such abstraction to a run-time model for the process control [21], [22]. Certainly many choices should be reconsidered and reanalyzed (e.g., it is inadmissible to merely put a device in a fault state whenever an unexpected condition occurs), discerning unrecoverable situations (that should promptly arrest the system) from recoverable ones.…”

Hierarchical and cooperative approaches to logic control design in industrial automation

“…Effective "guide-lines" for defining GAs can be summarized as follows: the union of the actuators associated with the set of GAs must be equal to the whole actuators set of the system; moreover, pursuing a non interference idea, each sensor and actuator can be managed by only one GA. For an exhaustive description on the use, the implementation and the characteristics of GA, the reader is referred to [11]. In that article, the GAs are classified in the two families Do/Done GAs and Start/Stop GAs.…”

“…Each GA handles a particular part of the plant (i.e. a specific actuation mechanism identified according to the guide-lines of [11], sketched Section 3), but without any "application specific intelligence", i.e. without a significant awareness of the complete plant.…”

“…The basic evolution rules adopted in GA definition are described by the automaton of Figure 4 (see [11] for further details); little variants are admissible to handle Idle, Init and Alarm states.…”

“…Another class of methodologies that is important to cite is the so called MDA (Model Driven Approach) (see [3] and [12]) where general modeling languages (such as UML) are exploited to model systems independently of their implementation platforms, to introduce agent-based approaches in control design and to generate platform-specific software code automatically from high level models (see [7], [9] and [10]). Beside the above mentioned methods, the authors have recently proposed a methodology for logic control design based on the Generalized Actuator concept (GA) [11]. In this framework policies and actuation mechanisms are clearly separated through the definitions of GA entities, which follows the conceptual line of Mechatronic Objects [14], but with a stronger standardization of interfaces and behaviors.…”