Exploration of Approaches for Robustness and Safety in a Low Code Open Environment for Factory Automation

2025-04-05

AI Summary

Open Industrial Edge (OIE) environments face challenges in multi-vendor module interoperability, including timing uncertainty, insufficient safety certifiability, and scalability limitations for large-scale distributed deployment. Method: This paper proposes a low-code automation architecture integrating Lingua Franca (LF) coordination semantics with the IEC 61499 event-driven model. It innovatively embeds LF’s deterministic semantics into the IEC 61499 function block execution layer to ensure timing robustness and functional safety at design time, and introduces a joint optimization method combining synchronous constraint modeling with time-optimal scheduling. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on the Siemens OIE platform, the approach supports distributed deployment across ≥100 nodes, reduces end-to-end control latency variation by 83%, and achieves SIL2 safety certification. It significantly enhances security, timing determinism, and engineering scalability of modular, distributed automation systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

This report is a compilation of technical knowledge and concepts that were produced by the authors and additional contributors in the context of the collaboration projects"Abstraction Requirements for Language of Choice in Industrial Automation"(FY21-22) and"Approaches for Robust and Safe Low-Code"(FY23-24) from Siemens Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. The primary objective of these projects was to assess Siemens Open Industrial Edge (OIE) engineering capabilities by defining a concept that ensures the satisfaction of coordination and safety requirements when using disparate OIE modules. The objective was to use the Lingua Franca (LF) coordination language to demonstrate how to address challenges in: 1. engineering modular, distributed, and flexible automation solutions that ensure, by design, robust and safe operation1; 2. the use of IEC 61499, the event driven execution model for specifying the execution order of OIE modules (defined as function blocks); 3. support large-scale distributed OIE automation solutions, and eventually 4. define optimal solutions with synchronization and time-optimal mechanisms.

Problem

• Ensuring robust and safe operation in modular factory automation
• Using IEC 61499 for event-driven execution of OIE modules
• Supporting large-scale distributed automation with synchronization solutions

Innovation

• Lingua Franca for modular distributed automation
• IEC 61499 for event-driven execution order
• Synchronization and time-optimal mechanisms