Standardized connections are intended to reduce implementation time. This is achieved through approaches such as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Although there is a substantial amount of literature on how this can be accomplished with solutions like the AAS, there are no quantitative studies indicating the extent to which standardization can reduce implementation time. We aim to demonstrate this through an experiment. We believe it is important to engage the community in a critical discussion about the experiment design before we proceed with its execution. This paper examines two designs of experiments to measure implementation time in comparison to manufacture-specific interfaces.Many issues concerning the setup are open for discussion. It becomes clear that to achieve a valid measurement, multiple experiments must be conducted at various field levels and with different experimental subjects. We want to encourage researchers to engage this dialogue and these studies. Future research will execute the presented experiments.

In the context of Industry 4.0, the automatic code and test generation from state diagrams embedded in specifications is a critical challenge for software correctness. In this paper we present an approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for the recognition of state diagrams to generate code and unit tests automatically. We compare the performance of LLMs with traditional computer vision models, highlighting the advantages of LLMs in terms of generalization and simplicity of setup. The results on two prominent industrial communication protocols, PROFINET and OPC UA, demonstrate the applicability of the approach, achieving significant reductions in manual effort and improving the accuracy of code and test generation.

The overall Industry 4.0 developments and the highly dynamic threat landscape enhance the need for continuous security engineering of industrial components, modules, and systems. Security risk assessments play a major role to ensure a secure operation of Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACSs) but are often neglected due to missing resources and a lack of human experts for the sophisticated manual tasks. To relieve this situation and to increase the degree of automation of security risk assessments, a method for information and process modelling was developed in a previous work. The approach was also implemented prototypically as an expert system but has not been validated, yet. This work therefore presents the validation as an integral part of the overall evaluation of the automated security risk assessment concept. For a systematic validation, a reference security risk assessment is manually defined as a set of data for the comparison with the results of the automated expert system. In addition, the two main hypotheses with regard to the result quality and the process automation evaluated.

The integration of diverse data sources into Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a cornerstone for the advancement of digital twin technologies in industrial ecosystems. To ensure proper data integration, a concept should meet the requirements related to data integration as well as those related to AAS. This study compares three key data integration concepts for AAS-BaSyx Python SDK, BaSyx DataBridge, and the standardized descriptive approach through Asset Interfaces Description (AID) & Asset Interfaces Mapping Configuration (AIMC) submodels. To evaluate the advantages and limitations of each concept, this study employs 12 distinct criteria, assessing how effectively each concept aligns with these criteria. The result provides insights into the unique features of each concept, informing stakeholders about optimal strategies. This study suggests a synergistic approach that combines the advantages of the various methodologies, thereby overcoming individual limitations and enhancing the digital twin ecosystems.

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is increasingly becoming a key tool for realizing the vision of autonomous and interoperable assets, such as production facilities and products, to enable flexible scheduling of production plans. The definition of the Type 3 AAS (proactive AAS) and ongoing research work suggests to alter the vision of proactive AAS to a standardized specification. This work shows an approach to combine AAS technologies with technologies and modelling approaches, currently common in the industry. This includes Workflow Management Systems and Business Process Models for achieving a proactive AAS. The approach builds on the specified Type 2 AAS (reactive AAS) and adds a newly developed submodel that is used by the Workflow Management System to transform the reactive AAS into a proactive AAS. An abstract architecture is shown which points out a general implementation approach for the aforementioned technologies. Additionally, with the new submodel, the integration of the Industry 4.0 language is presented, which enables interoperable communication for an automated production planning in the domain of wiring harness production.

The overall Industry 4.0 developments and the highly dynamic threat landscape enhance the need for continuous security engineering of industrial components, modules, and systems. Security risk assessments play a major role to ensure a secure operation of Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACSs) but are mostly neglected due to missing resources and a lack of human experts for the sophisticated manual tasks. Therefore, a method for information and process modelling regarding the automation of security risk assessments has been previously designed, but not yet evaluated. This work in progress begins the evaluation of the automated security risk assessment concept by investigating the related work and identifying the main deficits. The results include a requirements analysis for the verification and an outlook towards future evaluation aspects.

Due to Industry 4.0 developments, the demanded modularity of manufacturing systems generates additional manual efforts for security experts to guarantee a secure operation. The rising utilization of information and the frequent changes of systems necessitate continuous security engineering. Therefore, this work in progress presents the specification and prototypical implementation for automated security risk assessments. In addition, an outlook towards the associated validation, verification, evaluation, and hypothesis testing is given.

Self-organizing systems represent the next level of building automation and make it possible to reduce the manual engineering effort of automation systems. For self-organizing systems to be able to interact interoperable, the system components must be mapped by uniform digital twins and described in a semantically interoperable manner. Semantic interoperability is implemented in the current research approach of Industrie 4.0 through homogeneous semantics. However, given the large number of different manufacturers of technical components, agreement on uniform semantics seems unlikely. This paper presents a method that extends the Industrie 4.0 approach to heterogeneous semantics. Semantic interoperability is realized through the automated mapping of heterogeneous vocabularies to target semantics. Models from the artificial intelligence sub-field natural language processing are used for automated mapping. In this paper, existing models of natural language processing are compared with each other in terms of their mapping accuracy. A dataset based on the ECLASS standard is being developed as a basis for the comparison. This dataset is also being used to create new models that are fine-tuned to the target vocabulary. The results show that the mapping accuracy of existing approaches improves through fine-tuning by an average of 7.5% up to 93%. In addition to the improvement through fine-tuning, this work analyses the influence of the model size on the mapping accuracy by using large language models. Moreover, it examines the integration of structured knowledge in the form of knowledge graphs.

Due to Industry 4.0 developments, the demanded modularity of manufacturing systems generates additional manual efforts for security experts to guarantee a secure operation. The rising utilization of information and the frequent changes of system structures necessitate a continuous and automated security engineering, especially by application of the mandatory security risk assessments. Collecting the required information for these assessments and formalising expert knowledge shall improve the security of modular manufacturing systems in the future. In order to automate the security risk assessment process, this work proposes a method to determine the Target Security Level (SL-T) in conformance to the IEC 62443 standard based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework and the Intel Threat Agent Library (TAL).

Energy management systems are an important tool for increasing the energy efficiency of buildings. However, the widespread availability of such systems is offset by the complexity and high costs of implementation, as well as a lack of data. These obstacles can be addressed by using standardized digital twins of technical components. In combination with homogeneous semantics and standardized interfaces as uniform access points to information, the implementation of an energy management system can be simplified. However, given the large number of different manufacturers of the technical components, an agreement on a common semantic standard of the information elements seems unlikely. Studies show that methods from the field of natural language processing can be used to process heterogeneous semantics. An agreement on a common vocabulary is no longer necessary. Instead, different semantics can be used and matched to a target vocabulary. The implementation of such a matching service reduces the configuration effort for the implementation of an energy management system. Providing an Industrie 4.0 interface that contains the semantic matching service within the components allows the interaction between them and an energy management system. A prerequisite for automated interaction is the availability of information in a uniform structure in the form of an information model. This paper presents the design of an Industrie 4.0 asset administration shell and initial submodels for an energy management system. Additionally, an Industrie 4.0 interface for the semantic matching service is implemented in a prototypical application of an energy management system. This implementation demonstrates how the configuration effort of such a system can be reduced by semantic matching.

The digital twin, or more precisely the Asset Administration Shell, is the key element for interoperability in Industrie 4.0. Together with the asset, it forms the I4.0 component. For the development of I4.0 components, the availability of suitable software development tools is becoming increasingly relevant. However, it is not yet specified how these tools are to be systematically tested for correctness, compliance and conformity. These topics are the focus of this work. We show different established testing methods, evaluate their suitability and describe an approach for a capable test environment.

The current static risk assessment processes and concepts do not match the increasing requirements with regard to flexibility within the industrial automation domain. The amount of manual tasks and needed efforts for risk assessments are too high in order to adequately cover the rising rate of system reconfigurations. Analysing the typical risk assessment processes from the IEC 62443 will show resource constraints with regard to time, bottlenecks, and the main cost drivers. If the most rewarding process steps can be identified and automated, the overall performance of risk assessments can be enhanced to keep up with the demanded flexibility.

Platform Industry 4.0 conceptualizes Industry 4.0 as a smart factory that is composed of smart production processes, smart entities and smart products working in tandem to achieve larger goals, namely enabling flexible manufacturing, efficient resource utilization, optimal decision making, catering to individual preferences and creation of new services Smart entities are digital representations of physical or logical objects that can communicate with the external world and take independent decisions.These digital representations can choose different application-layer protocols (ALPs) such as MQTT or HTTP or CoAP for the exchange of messages with the external world. This requires addressing the concept of Application layer interoperability. In this paper, we review the past works by different authors that propose middleware architectures for enabling the exchange of messages in such a multi-protocol environment. Next, we argue for a better alternative and propose new architecture coined as Registry Infrastructure Component (RIC). RIC is a complex software component that maintains a registry, different ALP plugins. The digital representations have to register their ALP endpoint information with the RIC initially and later can post all the outbound messages to any of the RIC ALP plugins. The RIC takes the responsibility of transporting the message to the target recipient. Apart from registration with the RIC, the digital representations would have to communicate only in the I4.0 language.

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) looks to enable intelligent production by connecting and evaluating data. The asset administration shell, the Industry 4.0 specification of a digital twin describes various concepts to realize this data exchange. One part of the asset administration shell is the I4.0-language, which intends to standardize complex interactions between machines by using interaction protocols. VoiceXML is a W3C-standard from the field of interactive voice response, which has been established for several years. In this paper we analyze to which extend a future I4.0 interaction manager could derive VoiceXML-concepts to the asset administration shell. For this purpose, parallels between VoiceXML and the I4.0-language are shown and compared by implementing a selected interaction protocol from the VDI 2193 using VoiceXML.

In the scope of Industry 4.0 (I40), one goal is the standardized access to asset information and asset services using standardized submodels (submodel templates) in the Asset Administration Shell. Since submodel templates are modeled by different groups of people, the same asset information will be contained in several submodel templates. For automatic generation of new submodels based on existing information from other submodels, model transformation can be a solution. Therefore, in this contribution, we present a guideline on how to develop a new model transformation language for a given use case and apply this guideline to the concrete use case (model transformation for Asset Administration Shells). As a result, we define of the abstract syntax of a customized model transformation language called AASMTL.

Remaining Useful Life estimation based on stochastic methods has been widely used with successful results to forecast the first hitting time of a failure threshold on turbomachinery, as well as in navigation systems of real weapons. Nevertheless, not enough attention has been paid in the implementation in real production environments. Most of the Remaining Useful Life estimation methods implement an online adaption with each new data input, and with this they generate an updated estimation of the remaining useful life. However, given the conditions in the production, in some applications would be easier to generate an estimation based on remaining cycles before failure. Remaining cycles would be helpful to make maintenance decisions based on available produced parts, reducing undesired uncertainties generated by long pauses on the production bounded to human schedules. In this research, we implement Remaining Useful Life estimation on real production devices based on Bayesian prognosis, Wiener process, and Monte Carlo simulations. These methods are adjusted to deliver a result suitable for decision making in production environments. Moreover, a health score is implemented to generate an estimation only after some wear on the device is detected.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) has revolutionized the industrial sectors around the world. Industry 4.0, a digitalization endeavour by the government of Germany for the factories of the future, aims to create intelligent, self-organized, and self-optimized smart factories by combining the IoT, cloud computing and artificial intelligence together. Interoperability is one of the crucial aspects of Industry 4.0 which requires standardized information models and exchange mechanisms for heterogeneous platform integration. Despite the development of various industry standards, this still remains the biggest burden due to multiple protocols, technologies, and policies involved. A common understanding of data semantics can be helpful in mitigating such problem. This paper provides a detailed comparison between the modelling approaches of Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) and its extension languages. The aim is to garner a common understanding between these two modelling frameworks in order to generate a standardized mapping between them for the purpose of interoperable industrial applications.

Plant simulations can implement a digital twin. The digital twin is a mirror of the physical asset and shows the state of the assets and the processes at any time during production. Assets however change their behavior due to aging, faults and wear over time. If the simulation configuration and parameterization remain the same, the states of the simulation and the physical asset may drift apart. This paper suggests a method that applies optimization techniques to synchronize the states of the digital twin with the physical asset during production time and at the same time supports detecting changes and identifying their source.

Machine learning and statistical-based methods have been widely used to estimate the Remaining Useful Life of devices. However, in most of the cases, the transferability of these methods to production environments is complicated. The majority of these algorithms have been tested by using simulated data, or by the construction of testbeds. The complication is generated by some real conditions in such environments which are not considered during the algorithm development. This research addresses those drawbacks by considering real data delivered by a production device in order to construct the right condition monitoring parameter. This parameter will be obtained by analyzing the correlation among available data, and failure on the critical element on the machine. Moreover, the benefits and drawbacks of several data-driven approaches are analyzed, and a method is proposed based on the combination of the best properties of each one.

Modern Industrial Control Systems (ICS) introduce the terms such and Industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) that led to interconnectivity of several smart devices in an industry ranging from simple sensors to complex machines. With the advantages of interconnectivity, there is an equivalent rise in exposure to threats or attacks. Such attacks on ICS are inevitable and there exists several examples. In order to protect ICS from such attacks, a proper securing mechanism is necessary. This security mechanism needs to get trained for all possible attacks on the industrial network. Relaying of real data for training is almost impossible as we can't get the attack data to train and test the security mechanisms. For this purpose, we provide an injection attack toolbox developed in MATLAB/Simulink to insert manipulated data values into the plant data so that the security mechanism can understand the different behaviors of the possible attacks on ICS. The developed toolbox is freely available in GitHub and can be used for research purpose.

Current manufacturing and production systems are becoming more flexible and adaptable. Such systems demand rapid changeover and short configuration time of machines. With the adaptation of IT systems in the automation industry, machines and devices will have self-descriptive semantic device data description to represent their data elements and services. This paper proposes an approach to integrate new machines and devices into an existing production system without any manual intervention. The proposed concept provides a Plug & Produce system architecture and evaluates its capabilities based on OPC UA. The concept also describes an easy and fast integration of the digital representation of new field devices into an existing production system.

Nowadays typical validation in the development process of automated production plants includes Virtual Commissioning (VC) to test the control logic against the modelled plant behaviour. To reduce modelling efforts, the generation of models for VC is in practical often based on the existing control logic, e.g. hardware configuration of the PLC (used for automated signal mapping). This results in the limitation of testing at the end of the development process with resulting disadvantages like late detection of errors. In the meantime early automation concept evaluations are mainly done by empirical knowledge due to the lack of reliable models. In this paper we will present a component model and work-flow for coupling a 3D-CAD tool with a behavioural model of a mechatronic component for generating an initial virtual plant model allowing examining the feasibility of the selected components already during the mechanic design phase. The created model could also be used for iterative development of the control logic with an comprehensive VC at the end of the process utilizing the already developed model and thus reducing modelling efforts and enabling shorter validation cycles throughout the whole process.

Industrie 4.0 (I4.0) aims at a manufacturer-independent, vertical- and horizontal-oriented communication and cooperation within smart factories. This is only manageable using international standards. The so-called reference architecture model for Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) and the requirement specification of an I4.0 component are already available. RAMI4.0 could be the basis for the interoperability of the interactions. The working group “Semantic and interaction model for I4.0 components” (GMA 7.20) made progress in this direction. The language used for the interaction of I4.0 components needs model definitions for the interaction consisting of the structure of the components, syntax for the description of the messages and the means to assign the meaning to the language elements. This paper discusses the results for a broader audience.

Cooperation and collaboration of technical systems in different application contexts is one of the main targets of the vision of “Industrie 4.0” (I40). In order to bring this vision to industrial practice, it is necessary to define a semantic basis for information exchange between systems. This paper provides the results of a project that focused on semantic modeling based on standards relevant in the I40 context. Particularly, a meta model for modeling mechatronic systems as well as a meta model for modeling the systems characteristics is provided. The combination of the two developed meta models can be used for implementation in semantic technologies, i.e. Web Ontology Language, or AutomationML. Furthermore, a use-case is introduced that shows an implementation of the meta models in AutomationML with the use of ecl@ss properties in the engineering and operation of a discrete manufacturing system.

Cyber-attacks on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are growing in recent years. Existing IT-security technologies are not sufficient enough to protect the ICS from the novel attacks. Among several attack types on industrial networks, False Data Injection Attacks (FDIA) are considered as an important class of cyber-attacks against ICS. FDIA injects forged measurement into the control system in hope of misguiding the control algorithm. This abnormal behavior of a single control device or a sensor value in a plant can lead to a huge loss to the company or a disaster in plant environment. Hence, a prior identification of these injected attacks is very important. In this paper, we give an overview about different possible cyber-attacks on ICS followed by the importance and challenges in identifying FDIA w.r.t other attack types. A simulated ICS use case is developed to generate the sensor and actuator signals. An attack injection tool is developed and used to simulate the attacks on to the ICS network. The generated data with injected attacks is used to train and test the performance of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for identifying FDIA. The evaluation of performance parameters shows promising detection accuracies.

With the rapid application of the network based communication in industries, the security related problems appear to be inevitable for automation networks. The integration of internet into the automation plant benefited companies and engineers a lot and on the other side paved ways to number of threats. An attack on such control critical infrastructure may endangers people's health and safety, damage industrial facilities and produce financial loss. One of the approach to secure the network in automation is the development of an efficient Network based Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Despite several techniques available for intrusion detection, they still lag in identifying the possible attacks or novel attacks on network efficiently. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of detection mechanism by combining the deep learning techniques with the machine learning techniques for the development of Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The performance metrics such as precession, recall and F-Measure were measured.

The digital transformation across the whole value chain in the industry is aiming at increasing the overall efficiency of production services. In this context the Operational Technology (OT) and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) domains grow together to an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Interconnecting heterogeneous assets and services with each other that have typically not communicated before, arise multiple challenges. In order to enable physical assets to mutually negotiate the production process, they can be encapsulated by software components to form Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). However, how related Asset Administration Shells (AASs) will be implemented, is not yet defined in detail. While a number of approaches are under discussion, we assume that in the end exchanged information needs to be interoperable on a semantic level. In this paper, we argue that the oneM2M standard offers the required functionalities by allowing the use of Semantic Web technologies to formally describe interactions and exchanged information. We have started to validate our idea by extending an existing implementation in this regard. The main goal of this paper is to contribute towards a semantically interoperable IIoT vision that spans multiple vertical domains.

Network based communication is more vulnerable to outsider and insider attacks in recent days due to its wide spread applications in many fields. Intrusion Detection System (IDS) a software application or a hardware is a security mechanism that is able to monitor network traffic and find abnormal activities in the network. Machine learning techniques which have an important role in detecting the attacks were mostly used in the development of IDS. Due to huge increase in network traffic and different types of attacks, monitoring each and every packet in the network traffic is time consuming and computational intensive. Deep learning acts as a powerful tool by which thorough packet inspection and attack identification is possible. The parallel computing capabilities of the neural network make the Deep Neural Network (DNN) to effectively look through the network traffic with an accelerated performance. In this paper an accelerated DNN architecture is developed to identify the abnormalities in the network data. NSL-KDD dataset is used to compute the training time and to analyze the effectiveness of the detection mechanism.

Today's highly increasing product diversity and decreasing product life cycles, also in the automotive industry lead to fast changing production systems with a high ratio of mechatronic components and (control) software. That again leads to ever increasing use of Virtual Commissioning during the development process of automated manufacturing plants. Paired with the still increasing request towards better control program quality, this leads to the need of improved and more efficient virtual plants with more effortless set ups. The common techniques of simulating the plant within the Virtual Commissioning do no longer fulfil these needs, new approaches have to be developed. At the same time, requests towards higher efficiency and higher test coverage during Virtual Commissioning are rising, which leads to the need of developments of easier testing processes. The presented work is concerned with this further developments, especially the test methodology for virtual commissioning based on appropriate behaviour simulation of automated production systems within the automotive industry. Therefore the state of the art is analysed and existing spheres of activity are identified. Afterwards, new approach and solutions for this fields, namely the appropriate behaviour simulation as well as the automatization of testing, are elaborated. An extensive example implementation evaluates the presented results regarding feasibility and eligible performance. Thus, the elaborated outstanding improvements of Virtual Commissioning are not only presented but the corresponding proof of concept is also adduced.

Scheduling of time triggered communication systems belongs to the well known hard mathematical optimization problems. This paper tackles the communication scheduling problem in redundant network topologies, where the real-time process data has to be duplicated and sent on two different paths to its destination. This paper proposes an algorithm that is able to find a feasible schedule in a short time, while keeping the makespan of the schedule in average 10% shorter than the makespan of the schedule produced by a commercial tool, which is the current benchmark.

Industrial automation systems continuously get more complex and growing over time. This leads to an ever growing demand for efficient integration task bridging the gap between technologies, tools used across the enterprise, and alongside the value chain. With the new challenges imposed by introducing cyber-physical systems (CPSs) into industrial applications and while addressing Industry 4.0 concepts, the matter of integration is becoming even more crucial for the introduction of new technologies and their acceptance to customers. This paper introduces integration tasks to be tackled and describes up-to-date technologies as they are used in today's automation industry. This is the basis for concepts addressing the integration issue when introducing CPSs and establishing mixed systems. Investigations are made regarding exploiting integration strategies for future systems.

Today's increasing use of virtual commissioning during the development process of automated manufacturing plants paired with the still increasing request towards better control program quality leads to the need of improved virtual plants with more effortless set ups. The common techniques of simulating the plant within the Virtual Commissioning do no longer fulfil these needs, new approaches have to be developed. This paper examines the behaviour simulation of the mechatronic components of such automated manufacturing plants. It is argued how such components can be modelled meeting the raising demands. A conceptual procedure of model provisioning by manufacturers in an open and standardised way is presented and the way of how these models can be used within the Virtual Commissioning is demonstrated. Beyond that the requirements towards software executing this simulations is proposed.

Many aspects have to be considered while achieving flexibility of production systems. One of them is flexible communication system that on one hand fulfils requirements of a particular industrial application and on the other hand allows integration of new network components optimally in a seamless way. In this paper, an approach to increase, rather static, Time Triggered Ethernet based systems is proposed. It is based on a greedy scheduling approach that can be implemented directly in a processing limited hardware such as IO Controller. This, together with the discovery and auto configuration mechanism proposed in [1] allows to shift the engineering process typically performed offline using engineering tool to the field level. Furthermore, it has been proven that the proposed scheduling approach is not only simple but also powerful. It is able to calculate an optimal schedule for any kind of tree graph and the complexity of the algorithm is defined by the complexity of the used sorting algorithm.

Simulation technology is widely used in the engineering process of manufacturing plants, which promises the benefits such as debugging the programs of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) in the early design phase, validating the co-working of the associated machines and accelerating the commissioning time. Although many researches have been made on this topic in recent years, the high cost of simulation model development compensates most benefits mentioned above which could be gained Furthermore, the validation of the simulation model is mostly done manually because of the lack of a systematical testing method This paper proposes a concept to extend the IEC 61131-3 standard library for simulation modeling and testing of behavior of mechatronic components. Furthermore, this approach will be prototypical implemented and illustrated.

One of the most important requirements for the industrial networks, apart from the real-time capability, is the reliability. There are several methods that can be used to increase the communication reliability. One of them is data duplication, which is afterwards transmitted using two different (disjoint) paths. Since, such path search for time triggered Ethernet based systems is typically done during engineering, it is important to keep the time needed for that as short as possible. Especially, if some topology changes are foreseen causing system re-engineering. Therefore in this paper an algorithm is proposed that has linear time complexity and is able to find two possibly disjoint paths for an arbitrary network topology in a short time.

Todays increasing volatility of market demands and customer requirements are forcing industrial enterprises to realize and ensure an increased flexibility of production systems. Since current automation concepts and architectures for production systems do not provide the required flexibility sufficiently, new approaches have to be developed. This paper proposes an approach that implements the quickly evolving concept of Cyber-Physical Systems for the special case of production systems by means of software agents. A joined demonstrator of such Cyber-Physical Production System is described and used for the evaluation of the proposed multi-agent approach.

New standards like CAEX [1] and AutomationML [2] provide new means for data exchange between engineering tools. In order to provide an unambiguous exchange of information, a common data format should be used that is based on semantically well defined data elements as defined in IEC 61360 [3]. In order to use such data elements (e.g. properties), some extensions of the model defined in IEC 61360 are necessary. This contribution describes how the property model may be used during system engineering and introduces proposals on how to extend the property model.

The consequence of the increase of automation and therefore the growing complexity of automation tasks is a necessity for using distributed control architectures. This implicates a support for developers in the engineering of such distributed automation systems. For this reason, this paper focuses on the design support of distributed automation systems by use of design patterns. Important aspects are the consideration of non-functional requirements in design patterns and the integration of design patterns into the engineering workflow. This paper presents a design pattern template which supports developers with predefined automation functions which are assigned to a system function and in their selection of an appropriate distribution of automation functions, taking relevant non-functional requirements into account.

When designing a distributed control system consisting of heterogeneous components whose properties are usually not well known, it is difficult or even impossible to use an analytical approach to verify the fulfillment of all requirements. In this contribution, it is shown (at the example of different implementation scenarios for a typical control function) that detailed knowledge about the communication system is required to reliably assess and compare different designs of distributed systems with regard to a real-time characteristic. However, automation engineers typically can neither be expected to have such detailed knowledge about the internal details of computing and communication, nor do they have the time to study different design alternatives in detail. This motivates further work of the authors towards better engineering support for the design of distributed automation systems, by providing helpful advice regarding design decisions.

Distribution of automation functions onto several controllers has become a widely applied answer to the demands of huge and complex automated systems. Distributed networked automation systems offer advantages regarding various nonfunctional requirements, such as flexibility, availability and maintainability. On the other hand, they impose additional challenges, e.g. for fulfilling the real-time requirements. Control engineers face difficulties in coping with all non-functional requirements when designing distributed networked automation systems, as there are trade-offs between them. A complete and detailed model of the automation system, including all computation and network effects, is usually not available. Therefore, control engineers have a demand for support when making design decisions for distributed networked automation systems. In this contribution, the authors propose an engineering workflow which allows dealing with the design decisions and the non-functional requirements in an appropriate order, and underpins the need for additional support regarding design alternatives.

The reutilization of proven automation solutions for automation systems is an essential approach to increase the profitability of engineering services. Additionally, distributed systems are increasingly important in automation systems. For this reason, this paper focuses on the aspect of distributed systems combined with the reutilization of automation tasks and solutions in the domains of process and production automation. To address this purpose the research project “Functional application design of Distributed Automation systems” (FAVA) was launched. This paper presents the objective of this research project, identifies deficits of the state-of-the-art and describes automation systems which have been analyzed in the FAVA project to identify automation tasks and their variants regarding to the distribution.

Industrial production plants are highly complex mechatronic systems. In today's automation systems a trend for distribution of control functions can be observed. The hereby emerging challenges lead to delays and interruptions in automation projects. Especially non-functional requirements are hard to specify for later engineering phases. Therefore, a holistic engineering approach will be developed. As a first step, important challenges for the development of distributed automation systems are identified in this paper. Based on this, non-functional requirements derived from an information science point of view are adapted to the specifics of automation technology.

Industrial communication systems standardize communication protocols and services. Interoperability within automation and control systems need additional application definitions. This is usually organized with fieldbus profile specifications. Profiles become part of the overall development process of the device manufacturer. Unfortunately, today's profile descriptions are very informal and have nearly no support for the development process. This paper presents a semi-formal profile specification approach, based on IEC 62390 and using a mixed UML and MS Word process. Result of both specifications is an XML representation which can be integrated in the device development process. This method is developed for the PROFIBUS User Organisation for PROFIBUS and PROFINET device profiles.

During plant life cycle very different information is collected regarding the components of the plant. The information is different not only in contents but also in regard to source, semantic and context. In order to use the heterogeneous information sources, the information regarding a specific topic needs to be found and integrated. This paper discusses the mechanisms for discovery and integration of information regarding a specific component of the plant based on OPC UA information transport.

In order to meet the various challenges in the automotive industry, new and integrated methodologies for production planning and ramp-up processes are required. Thus, a concept for automated PLC software generation based on standardized digital process information is introduced with the special focus on the needs of the body shop in the automotive industry. The foundation for PLC software generation is a digital process plan that describes the production steps in a graphical way. For the special needs of PLC software generation new process elements and attributes are introduced. So the process plan contains the stepwise specialization of all necessary information for a PLC program. This paper additionally presents a specification extending the digital process information with resource-specific PLC function blocks.

Today's plants are equipped with decentralised automation systems. In these plants, industrial communication between the devices is required. Reliable communication standards ensure the exchange of information. To guarantee the correct implementation of the underlying communication standards, the communication interfaces of automation devices have to be checked using conformance and interoperability tests. This paper describes a formalised and continuous development process of a test tool used for conformance tests for safety communication interfaces. The application of this tool implies the test of the PROFIsafe profile for PROFIBUS DP and PROFINET 10.

The international standard IEC 61499 defines an event-driven, distributed application based on function blocks. Such a block represents a kind of object with an internal behaviour. The blocks interact via input and output variables with other blocks or with their environment. This article describes an approach for the transformation of the sequential function chart (SFC) to IEC 61499 function blocks. The IEC 61499 function blocks are executed on a runtime, based on a distributed, object-oriented automation system, using objects interacting via the port concept.

The concept of FB based on newly appearing standard IEC 61499 originates in automation engineering and corresponds to the distributed control structure. A FB represents an abstraction of a software functional unit comprising an individual data structure and associated operations. To support the mature of the FB-related design paradigm in this paper, we discuss the specification of FBs and FB applications in UML. The paper suggests three types of models which have the purposes of general specification, automated code generation and test case generation. The first and second models are specified in UML while the third one is to be formalised in certain formal language. We focus on the first two model specification in this paper which transform FB-related elements in UML expressions. This shows that the rich resources provided for UML can be applicable to FB paradigm. The characteristics and the potential use of the model are discussed.

In already installed fieldbus instrumentations, a configuration-free and manufacturer-independent access to field device information sets is still missing. Due to the lack of suitable and simple models, as well as of interaction patterns of field devices in various information worlds of process control engineering, the practical use made of device novelties is rather complex. This affects high investments for engineering this information in various applications of process control engineering. Modern field devices contain embedded information sets that are ever-increasing, and provide great opportunity for innovative asset management functionality. In this paper we present an information server, serving as an additional information channel between field and plant level in process industry. We show that this so-called asset management box provides the configuration-free analysis of fieldbus segments, the open access to installed field devices and the automatically updated, structured and self-descriptive presentation of their embedded information sets. Its basic functionality fulfills one prerequisite of an efficient asset management system: the analysis of the actual state of a fieldbus installation, without prior knowledge about the installed field devices and enhanced investments in engineering. We discuss several asset management applications, implemented on the asset management box. To prevent excessive investments for engineering of asset management applications themselves, widest flexibility and extensibility of the management systems' functionality is required. The box's structure permits easy extensibility of plant and client-specific applications as well as the easy integration of specific fieldbus hardware, the box provides a universal fieldbus interface.

Today, the large number of different device types and suppliers within a control system project makes the engineering and configuration task difficult and time-consuming. Different tools must be mastered and data must be exchanged between these tools. A solution can be achieved by standardising suitable interfaces to achieve data sharing and framework integration. For the computable description of device parameters, the so called electronic device description (EDD) language (EDDL) is specified. The EDD is used for the configuration and the operational behaviour of a device. Furthermore, the field device tool (FDT) concept defines the interfaces between device-specific software components (or device type manager (DTM)) provided by the device supplier and the engineering tool of the control system manufacturer. A DTM can easily be developed using existing EDD files as shown in this article. Therefore, an EDD and FDT are not contradictory technologies, instead they complement each other.

Effective solutions for asset management become increasingly important in modern automation and control systems. They are especially required in the area of process control. The control systems used here usually consist of PLC-based networks, which are optimised concerning the special temporal and topological requirements of the process. Asset management functions have to be introduced to those systems, without any influence on the existing equipment. The paper shows an object-oriented solution based on PROFIBUS-PA device. By automatically evaluating a system structure and mapping the profile-relevant parameters of devices to proxy objects, different application modules for asset management functions can be implemented acting on these objects.

Enterprise integration is one of the most important tasks in modern automation and control solutions. For effective applications at enterprise level, specific interfaces and description models have to be defined. Considering these enterprise applications playing each a specific use case, a role, to the underlying automation and control system, role-specific descriptions with special semantics and syntax have to be generated. These descriptions represent specific views of a general system's information set. To keep them consistent and easy to create, new methods for their handling have to be introduced. This paper shows a concept for generating role-specific descriptions based on XML.