IEC 61131 as enabler of OO and MDD in industrial automation

摘要

The IEC 61131 standard has accepted high criticism last years regarding its compliance with state of the art software engineering practices and concepts. A new version of the standard with main focus on an Object Oriented (OO) extension is under development. In this paper, a different point of view of the IEC 61131 is presented. It is claimed that 61131 already supports basic concepts of the OO programming paradigm and it has already introduced in the industrial automation domain the Model Driven development paradigm that is widely accepted in software and system engineering. Extensions are proposed to improve the standard's support to the model driven development paradigm and mainly the platform independent modeling.