Towards a Software Engineered Road for Developing Process Control Systems

To precisely develop process control systems that fulfill user needs, a software engineered road should be planned and followed. In order to accomplish this, such a road should consider tracing the user needs to the implementation level, enabling reasoning about the software application at the different development stages and keeping a model of the refined user needs for maintenance and possible evolution. Hence, the application can be developed and checked incrementally in a fashion that breaks down the effort into small manageable activities. Formalizing and refining the requirements of process control systems are considered crucial steps in developing precise and correct control applications. Thus, we focused on analyzing the requirements of process control systems by adapting the goal-driven analysis method of KA os. The goal driven nature can bridge the gap between the user perspective and the refined level of the formal specifications representing the control application. We illustrate our approach using a production cell case study as an example of planning and following such an engineered road to develop software controllers Tracks: 3.4 Software Engineering, 3.8 Control Systems