Partitioning of hierarchical automation systems

Abstract

The research described concerns the partitioning of large control applications for a multi-computer system in order to meet plant localization requirements and to exploit parallelism. The considered applications have hierarchical structure and are composed by a network of automata. Our application domain is the automation of power stations and electricity distribution. Because of strong EM noise in such environments, the software architecture is organized to be tolerant to transient faults, which could affect the stability of the control system. The hierarchical structure provides a decompositional approach to the design of complex applications. The context for this work is the ASFA platform, originally designed by the Italian board of electricity. The main result is a new partitioning algorithm for hierarchical automata networks, that splits the application into sub-networks which are deadlock-free, compliant with localization constraints, and as parallelizable as possible. The algorithm is also able to satisfy mutual exclusion constraints and to take into account computation/communication weights to achieve balancing of partitions.