Agile and hierarchical round-trip engineering of IEC 61131-3 control software

Abstract The control software often performs complex, important, and responsible operations in industrial manufacturing systems. The size and complexity of such software are still increasing, thus it is important to provide engineers with methods and tools that simplify the development process. The situation can be improved by modeling using the Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach, standardized implementation process, as well as various testing methods. In the paper, the authors propose the further step, which consists of the comprehensive agile hierarchical round-trip engineering approach dedicated to the IEC 61131-3 control software. It divides the project into four connected parts – model, configuration, implementation, and tests. Such a solution allows developers to work independently and iteratively on various project parts, because changes are discovered automatically and are propagated to suitable views inside the project. The synchronization mechanism has been introduced into the CPDev engineering environment for programming industrial controllers.