UMIICA: A Model-Driven Integrated Development Environment for Industrial Control Applications

Abstract

With the growing complexity of software-based industrial control applications, the demand for reliable software in the industrial control domain has also been increasing. Although the robustness of complex industrial control applications can benefit from formal modeling and verification, there remains a significant gap between formally verified models and real implementation. A model-driven development approach can be a solution to this problem. This paper aims to introduce a full-fledged model-driven integrated development environment, called UMIICA, for developing reliable industrial control applications. For this goal, we first determined the requirements imposed by the model-driven development process of networked industrial control applications. Based on these requirements, we analyzed the problems to be solved and designed the UMIICA tool according to the problem statements. Our proposed UMIICA tool is a full-fledged development environment for better productivity and software quality in our target application domain in that it incorporates whole model-driven development phases with cross-platform support and preserves the verified model behavior on the final implementation. As a case study, we constructed a three-axis cartesian robot testbed and developed an application for the testbed via the UMIICA tool. The evaluation results on our testbed also proved the effectiveness of UMIICA regarding the functional correctness and real-time performance guarantee of the resulting target application.