Emulation of Cyber-Physical Systems Using IEC-61499

Abstract

Automation systems used in smart grids, transportation, and medical electronics are cyber physical in nature. Automation standards, such as IEC-61499, while well suited to the design of discrete controllers, are not ideally suited to model the dynamics of the plant. Such modeling is essential for emulation-based validation of the controllers in the cyber-physical systems (CPS) domain. We use a well-known formal model for CPS, called hybrid input output automata (HIOA), as the main vehicle in the proposed formulation. A physical process (the plant) may be described as a synchronous composition of a network of such HIOA. We provide an approach to transform such a network to a composite function block (CFB) in IEC-61499. This transformation is shown to be semantics preserving. Code generated from such plant models can be executed on a computer chip to provide real-time response to their adjoining controllers. Through practical examples, we illustrate the scalability and practicability of the proposed approach. The developed approach enables the emulation of physical processes in industrial automation without using the actual plant.