Adapting Grafchart for Industrial Automation

Sammanfattning: Current trends in industrial automation are the need for customizable production, vertical integration, more advanced sensors and actuators, and shorter time to market. The currently used control systems and languages for control were developed with a more static production in mind. More flexible languages and tools are needed to get a more flexible production. The flexible graphical programming language Grafchart, based on the IEC 61131-3 standard language Sequential Function Charts (SFC), is considered with the focus to make it usable in an industrial context. Modern compiler techniques are evaluated for JGrafchart, a Grafchart implementation, with focus on extensible automation language implementations. In particular implementing the High Level Version (HLV) of Grafchart as an extension would make JGrafchart more dynamic and enable further research on HLV. To make Grafchart possible to use at the lowest levels of automation, realtime execution with JGrafchart is considered. For this to be possible the execution engine must be separated from the editor. In the first step the execution engine is still an interpreter, but an order of magnitude faster than before. Finally Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a highly flexible software design methodology widely used for business processes, is brought to automation by integrating support for Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) in JGrafchart.