Project

Executive Summary

Motivation

Industrial automation and control systems are composed out of logically interconnected but physically separated software components. They cooperate in order to perform automation and control tasks. Subcomponents of such systems require diverse communication links with different protocols and specific quality of service (QoS) constraints. These QoS requirements for communication have an important impact to the overall system design and must be considered during the engineering of the automation and control system, which have not been considered by model-driven engineering approaches so far. Identifying this issue, FRONTICS researches description and modelling methods for application, hardware and communication.

Vision

Within the domain of dependable systems for military appliances and aircrafts modelling languages such as AADL are established as standard architectural description languages. Therefore FRONTICS aims at adopting these concepts to enable model-driven configuration of heterogeneous and hybrid communication networks within automation and control systems. Logical communication constraints defined within the application are directly transformed into physical communication configurations of the available communication systems (e.g. CAN). The project’s main innovation is the integration of standardized architectural description languages with accepted domain-specific hardware description languages to found the basis for model-driven configuration networked automation systems.

Objectives

The main objectives of FRONTICS are:
  • Enable abstract definition of communication constraints in component-based application models.
  • Provide a means to describe the hardware, the interconnecting network and their quality of service.
  • Define a workflow including the modelling of application, hardware and communication relationships.
The feasibility of the FRONTICS modelling and configuration technology will be shown by applying it to laser tracker guided, high precision antenna positioning systems for the measurement of the radiation/emission characteristics of antennas for aerospace applications from our project partner EADS Astrium.

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