Ladder Metamodeling & PLC Program Validation through Time Petri Nets

Darlam Bender (1) , Benoit Combemale (1) , Xavier Crégut (1, 2) , Jean-Marie Farines (3) , Bernard Berthomieu (4) , François Vernadat (4)

1 IRIT-ACADIE - Assistance à la Certification d’Applications DIstribuées et Embarquées
2 Toulouse INP - Institut National Polytechnique (Toulouse)
3 Federal University of Santa Catarina
4 LAAS - Laboratoire d'analyse et d'architecture des systèmes

Ladder Diagram (LD) is the most used programming language for Programmable Logical Controllers (PLCs). A PLC is a special purpose industrial computer used to automate industrial processes. Bugs in LD programs are very costly and sometimes are even a threat to human safety. We propose a model driven approach for formal verification of LD programs through model-checking. We provide a metamodel for a subset of the LD language. We define a time Petri net (TPN) semantics for LD programs through an ATL model transformation. Finally, we automatically generate behavioral properties over the LD models as LTL formulae which are then checked over the generated TPN using the model-checkers available in the Tina toolkit. We focus on race condition detection. This work is supported by the topcased project, part of the french cluster Aerospace Valley (granted by the french DGE), cf. http://www.topcased.org

Mots clés: PLC; Time Petri Nets; MDA; Model Transformation; ATL; Model Checking; Formal Verification; Ladder Diagram

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Darlam Bender, Benoit Combemale, Xavier Crégut, Jean-Marie Farines, Bernard Berthomieu, et al.. Ladder Metamodeling & PLC Program Validation through Time Petri Nets. Model Driven Architecture - Foundations and Applications (ECMDA 2008), Jun 2008, Berlin, Germany. pp.121-136, ⟨10.1007/978-3-540-69100-6_9⟩. ⟨hal-00369887⟩