Our paper Runtime Enforcement for IEC 61499 Applications has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of SEFM 2022, the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods.
The abstract is below:
Industrial automation is a complex process involving various stakeholders. The international standard IEC 61499 helps to specify distributed automation using a generic architectural model, targeting the technical development of the automation. However, analysing the correctness of IEC 61499 models remains a challenge because of their informal semantics and distributed logic. We propose new verification techniques for IEC 61499 applications. These techniques rely on the concept of runtime enforcement, which can be applied to systems for preventing bad behaviours from happening. The main idea of our approach is to integrate an enforcer in the application for allowing it to respect specific properties when executing. The techniques begin with the definition of a property. The language of this property supports features such as discarding and replacing events. Next, this property is used to synthesise an enforcer in the form of a function block. Finally, the synthesised enforcer is integrated into the application. Our approach is illustrated on a realistic example and fully automated using tool support.
This is joint work with Irman Faqrizal and Gwen Salaün.