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Grafchart for Industrial Automation

JGrafchart

Researchers: Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson

Funding: LCCC

Grafchart has proven to be a very capable and suitable language for various control applications on both local and on supervisory level as well as for all levels of automation. It also has potential for formal descriptions, validation, and analysis. It has been used with for a wide variety of applications, e.g. batch control, discrete control, and diagnosis and the paradigm fits all of these very well.

Project aims:

  • To evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using Grafchart for industrial applications compared to the languages used today
  • To improve the state of art of Grafchart

The research in this project primarily focuses on aspects that are considered important and useful for the industry. In particular the current focus is on the following topics:

  • Add SOA support for Grafchart, and evaluate it in real setups. The SOA paradigm is promising approach to deal with the currently increasing complexity, increasing requirements on flexibility, and increasing demand for vertical integration.
  • Real-time execution of Grafchart applications. This also enables exploring how to handle e.g. reconfiguration of running applications. Reconfiguration is taken for granted in the automation world but is rather unexplored from a research point of view.
  • Improved object orientation support for Grafchart. Analyse various constructs of other modern programming languages, check if they are possible to add to Grafchart, and evaluate the benefits of adding them.

SOA/DPWS Demonstrator

Publications

 

Alfred Theorin, Josefin Berner: "Implementation of an Asymmetric Relay Autotuner in a Sequential Control Language". In IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE 2015), Gothenburg, Sweden, August 2015.

Alfred Theorin, Kristoffer Bengtsson, Julien Provost, Michael Lieder, Charlotta Johnsson, Thomas Lundholm, Bengt Lennartsson: "An Event-Driven Manufacturing Information System Architecture". In IFAC/IEEE Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM2015), Ottawa, Canada, May 2015.

Alfred Theorin, Tore Hägglund: "Derivative backoff: The other saturation problem for PID controllers". Journal of Process Control, 33, pp. 155–160,2015.

Alfred Theorin: A Sequential Control Language for Industrial Automation. PhD Thesis Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, November 2014.

Alfred Theorin, Johan Hagsund, Charlotta Johnsson: "Service Orchestration with OPC UA in a Graphical Control Language". In 19th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, Barcelona, Spain, September 2014.

Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "An Interactive PID Learning Module for Educational Purposes". In 19th IFAC World Congress, Cape Town, South Africa, August 2014.

Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "A Freely Available Interactive PID Learning Module". In Reglermöte 2014, Linköping, Sweden, June 2014.

Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "On Extending JGrafchart with Support for FMI for Co-Simulation". In 10th International Modelica Conference, Lund, Sweden, March 2014.

Tobias Gerber, Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "Towards a seamless integration between process modeling descriptions at Business and Production levels - work in progress". Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 25:5, pp. 1089–1099,2014.

Lisa Ollinger, Detlef Zuhlke, Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "A Reference Architecture for Service-oriented Control Procedures and its Implementation with SysML and Grafchart". In 18th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, Cagliari, Italy, September 2013.

Alfred Theorin: "Adapting Grafchart for Industrial Automation". Licentiate Thesis ISRN LUTFD2/TFRT--3260--SE, Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, May 2013.

Alfred Theorin, Lisa Ollinger, Charlotta Johnsson: "Service-oriented Process Control with Grafchart and the Devices Profile for Web Services". In Theodor Borangiu, Andre Thomas, Damien Trentesaux (Eds.) (Eds.): Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing and Robotics: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer, January 2013.

Alfred Theorin, Karl-Erik Årzén, Charlotta Johnsson: "Rewriting JGrafchart with Rewritable Reference Attribute Grammars". In Industrial Track of Software Language Engineering 2012, Dresden, Germany, September 2012.

Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "Polymorphism for State Machines". In ISA Automation Week 2012, Orlando, FL. USA, September 2012.

Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "Graphical Programming Language Support for Service Oriented Architecture in Automation". In Reglermöte 2012, Uppsala, Sweden, June 2012.

Alfred Theorin, Lisa Ollinger, Charlotta Johnsson: "Service-oriented Process Control with Grafchart and the Devices Profile for Web Services". In 14th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM), Bucharest, Romania, May 2012.

Tobias Gerber, Alfred Theorin, Charlotta Johnsson: "Towards a seamless integration between process modeling descriptions at Business and Production levels - work in progress". In 14th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM), Bucharest, Romania, May 2012.

 
2013-07-15