Engineering & runtime environment for distributed automation and control systems

• Modelling of control and evolution control
1. Acquire existing application: Collect all data necessary for describing the current system state and deliver it as input to the application modeling. The data consists of the system model including applications currently running in the system,
   the hardware configuration of the system, the mapping of the applications to the different devices and the hardware capability descriptions.
   
2. Application Modelling: Modelling the new control application is based on the existing ones by adding/removing components, their interconnections and specification of application properties (e.g. real–time constraints). The next
   step is the configuration of the hardware structure with devices and network connections. After this the modelled application parts are mapped to the according devices they should be executed on. The final step is the verification and validation of the control application in order to determine if the specified constraints will be met.
   
3. Evolution Engineering: With the delta analysis differences between the current running control application and the newly modeled control application are determined. These differences serve as input and starting point for the modelling of the evolution control application that will change the existing application to the new one. The reconfiguration control properties and parameters are specified in the same way as control application properties (according to step 2). Similar to the mapping of the control application the reconfiguration application parts are mapped to the devices. The final step is the verification of the evolutioncontrol application.
   
4. Execution of System Evolution: To execute evolution control applications the utilization of basic reconfiguration services at runtime platforms based on IEC 61499 management commands . The first step is to instantiate the evolution control application on the according devices. Next the execution of the evolution control application is done, i.e. the currently running control application is transformed into the new control application. This is achieved through basic reconfiguration services proving real–time constraint execution of reconfiguration processes at device level. To finish the evolution procedure the evolution control application will be removed after it has successfully executed all commandsand all changes are finished.