Overview of the MEDEIA Project

As the level of automation and system complexity in factories and plants increases steadily,  system engineering becomes more difficult and less-productive. The MEDEIA project's objective is a radical improvement in productivity for the development of embedded control systems within the European industrial automation sector.

The project goal of reducing system design time by 25%  will be achieved through the systematic development of the following elements:

1. A formal framework for model-driven component-based development of embedded control
2. An easily - understandable modelling method designed for use by domain experts
3. An integrated modelling of diagnostics
4. The integrated simulation and verification of systems design
5. An automatic, embedded,and platform specific code-generation for the deployment of control software to heterogeneous automation hardware
6. A series of proof–of-concept demonstrations on real-world applications by project partners in the application domain of robotics, manufacturing and power generation

The European industrial automation industry will benefit from the MEDEIA results. The project will support the industry by means of creating a powerful method to design and maintain both long - term operational installations as well as automation solutions in environments with rapidly changing demands. To ensure  wide usage of the project results the MEDEIA method will be standardised and to provided as an open source design tool.

The increased productivity of system development through the provision of a novel model-driven design method for embedded control and diagnostics will be developed by using Automation Components as a major design component. This leading - edge scientific and technical research will also help to reinforce European scientific and technological leadership.

In summary, MEDEIA will produce a pioneering methodology and a prototypical design and engineering framework for embedded system design, which will enable the European industrial automation industry to reduce its system design time and its costs for the development of complex control systems. A prototypical design tool will be developed and offered as an open source solution.

Rationale of the MEDEIA Design Approach

The current situation for the design of embedded Industrial Automation and Control Systems is characterized by a huge variety of different approaches in both the specification and implementation of plants (in any occurrence whether continuous or discrete processes). Different end-users of an automation system may use any of the available specification methods, often dependent on their domain (the term domain is not used as an umbrella term for a big market sector but instead, for a specific field of application). The specification method is used to describe end-users’ needs and wishes. End-user specifications can take several forms:

• Textual description,
• Gantt charts,
• Pert diagrams,
• P & ID (Pipe and Instrumentation Diagrams),
• Lists of sensors and actuators,
• VGB R170C,
• VDI/VDE 3682, etc.

The list may be continued ad infinitum because different companies often describe their own specification methods and internal standards. When different end-users, each of whom has expressed their requirements in different forms, have to interact, difficulties arise. Currently, very little support exists in automated workflows or even in the interoperability of different software tools implementing the combined set of specifications, partly because the specifications themselves have been defined in different forms. The problems are not only limited to the front end of the development process. In any automation solution, the implementation of solutions reflecting end-user requirements is completed by programmers, each of which expresses the solution based upon different preferences according to the type of plant and various environmental conditions. Most often, the solutions are complex meaning that different vendors of control systems with different programming languages have to be incorporated. There is, currently, no possibility to reuse existing code between platforms. Even more importantly, there often exists no formalized way of mapping from specifications to implementations. The following figure depicts this current situation in the upper part of the schematic, where there are different kinds of users using different methods for specification and implementation. You will note the key issue - there is only very little communication (in a formalized manner) possible among the different users. This is especially problematical because, in general, there are many different people involved in the establishment of a plant.

The main idea of the MEDEIA approach is to put a common element, the Automation Component (AC), in between the specification and the implementation elements of a plant automation system implementation. This element bridges the gap between the different users and their special ways of specifying and implementing any given solution.



Figure: Rationale of the MEDEIA Design Approach

The MEDEIA Design Approach

Designing an automation solution for a plant or factory is difficult for a number of reasons:

• The design methodologies and the corresponding implementation technologies differ among existing automation solutions, and
• This diversity makes the overall design difficult, especially when different machines and embedded devices have to work together.

To overcome these limitations MEDEIA aims at a meta-design architecture for the plant. This implies two key elements:

• The MEDEIA design methodology is based on ACs which are a combination of embedded hardware and software. An AC is “in general a combination of embedded hardware and software.” Both aspects—hardware and software—are necessary to build up an AC and are described in appropriate models. These models allow an integrated engineering across organisation borders. For example, an (industrial) robot can be seen as an AC. It consists of both hardware (i.e. Robot Kinematics and Robot Control Device) and software (i.e. Robot Control Application), which are necessary to distinguish ACs from “ordinary” mechanical or mechatronical parts or components.
• The starting point of each engineering flow is the definition/specification of the system requirements. The MEDEIA design flow accepts functional and non-functional specification of a plant (e.g. for manufacturing, robotics or power generation systems) as the initial starting point.

The following figures show the flexible design flow of the MEDEIA approach and the main design element, the ACs. 



Figure: Flexible design flow


Figure: Automation Component Model