Model-based design of time-triggered real-time embedded systems for digital manufacturing

Abstract

This work presents a novel Model-Based Design (MBD) approach and associated tool-chain for the IEC 61131-3 specific Programmable Logical Controllers (PLC) [2]. Our tool-chain automatically synthesizes software for manufacturing Time-Triggered Real-time Embedded (TTRE) systems. A Software-In-the-Loop Simulation (SILS) framework integrated into our tool-chain helps to reduce the design iterations. Using a manufacturing robot-arm use-case, we validate our tool-chain and demonstrate a 39x improvement in the Quality-of-Control (QoC) when compared to the state-of-the-art approach [1]. Our auto-generated scheduler meets all the hard real-time constraints (zero deadline misses) for a given TTRE system when compared to the scheduler (e.g., 145 deadline misses for a CPU utilization of 95%) presented in [13].