PBCS: PLC based control systems Workshop

Europe/Paris
Virtual workshop (Shanghai (China) [Virtual])

Virtual workshop

Shanghai (China) [Virtual]

ICALEPCS 2021
Borja Fernandez Adiego (CERN), Brad Schofield (CERN), Enrique Blanco Vinuela (CERN), Jeronimo Ortola Vidal (CERN)
Description

This ICALEPCS 2021 conference workshop intends to create a collaborative space where attendees will show and exchange their best practices, tools employed and return of experience when engineering PLC based control systems. Specific topics we would like to address are:

       - Specifications
       - Software development under Standards and/or Frameworks.
       - PLC Suppliers IDEs: Advanced software engineering features availability
       - Novel paradigms: e.g. Automatic code generation, object orientation...|
       - New technology trends: e.g. embedded OPC-UA, MQTT
       - Programming language choice and coding conventions: Best practices
       - Application management: source version control & deployment service
       - Testing and verification: Methodologies and tests (FAT, SAT), virtual commissioning, formal methods...
       - Upgrade and/or reengineering of applications
       - Documentation
 

Challenges
    - PLC based applications life spans for more than 15 years in most of the cases. Maintenance and handling of those applications is a complex task, as usually the applications do not follow any structure but the automation engineer own implementation. Is standardization a real need? Do the control frameworks give any help on this?

    - Testing industrial applications is a time consuming task together with an incomplete exercise. Compromises must be found to the test coverage (e.g. difficult offline tests). Verification is emerging as alternative action. What is the best method to test an application?

    - Deploying applications must be tracked and the software components deployed must be easily traceable. In case of an issue in a delivered component in a project, a efficient identification of the affected PLCs should be straight forward. Are you in measure to identify this effectively?

    - Handling cents of applications becomes a difficult task. Online modifications are required along the life of control systems and the management of such changes must be addressed. How engineers handle the follow up of changes with respect to initial specifications? How a standby service could know the right application to download to a PLC without the expert assistance?

 

Call for interest

This call for interest aims to find out in which domain of those proposed in the workshop you are interested and also if you are willing to contribute. We require you to fill in the call for interest to get an idea of potential attendees (infrastructure) and to tune the contents in function of your needs/proposals.

We are not requiring specifically any conference publication but rather contributions in one of the final proposed topics (e.g. presentation) although you could join to the workshop without contributing to any specific area.

This call for interest  is done to better organise the contents of the workshop. The official REGISTRATION to the workshop must be done in the conference registration web page (ICALEPCS 2021).

Filling in this call for interest does NOT allow you to assist to the ICALEPCS 21 conference or workshop. 

Do not hesitate to give feedback with your proposals during the pre-inscription.

Registration
Registration
40 / 75
Participants
  • Alberto Rubio García
  • Antonio Bartalesi
  • Bernard Baranasic
  • Borja Fernandez Adiego
  • Brad Schofield
  • Choji Saji
  • Christine Mathilde Betz
  • Danilo Bisiach
  • Dmitry Egorov
  • Enrique Blanco Vinuela
  • Fabio Giacuzzo
  • Frederic William Hoguin
  • Henrique Canova
  • Ioan Kozsar
  • Istvan Mohacsi
  • Jack Harper
  • Jarosław Szewiński
  • Jean-Charles Tournier
  • Jeronimo ORTOLA VIDAL
  • Jorge Villanueva
  • Juan Manuel Pablo Rodriguez
  • Juan Salvador Fernández Prat
  • Karen White
  • Lorenzo Pivetta
  • Loris Antoniazzi
  • Lucas Arruda
  • Massimo Trevi
  • Mauro Giacchini
  • Mikhail Nozdrin
  • Najm us Saqib
  • Patrick ROMMELUERE
  • Qun Liu
  • Robert Willian Polli
  • Sarah Medley
  • Stephane Deghaye
  • Tom Joannem
  • Tong Zhang
  • xiao wang
  • Yongcheng He
  • Yuliang Zhang
Surveys
Feedback PBCS workshop
    • 14:00 14:10
      Introduction

      Workshop introduction

      Convener: Dr Enrique Blanco Vinuela (CERN)
      • 14:00
        Workshop introduction 10m
        Speaker: Dr Enrique Blanco Vinuela (CERN)
    • 15:00 15:30
      Institutes presentations
      Convener: Dr Enrique Blanco Vinuela (CERN)
    • 15:40 16:00
      Coffe break: Coffee break
    • 16:00 16:20
      Upgrades strategies: Hardware Upgrades

      Hardware upgrades strategies and concepts

      Convener: Borja Fernandez Adiego (CERN)
    • 16:20 17:00
      Testing & verification: Testing & Verification techniques
      Convener: Jeronimo Ortola Vidal (CERN)
      • 16:20
        CI/CD techniques for quality assurance 20m

        Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) are concepts that have been widely adopted in the sphere of software engineering. Continuous Integration heavily emphasises frequent, small commits to a central version control system, after which a sequence of automated build and test steps are performed. Continuous Delivery focuses on the automation of the release procedures. Together, the techniques aim to reduce the burden on the developers, and to facilitate a smooth, consistent and error-free workflow. In this presentation, a set of tools aimed at enabling CI/CD for PLC-based controls are presented, along with a short demonstration of their use in a production project at CERN.

        Speaker: Brad Schofield (CERN)
      • 16:40
        Formal verification of PLC programs with PLCVerif 20m

        Formal verification techniques, in particular Model Checking, are powerful methods that can be used to guarantee that a PLC program is compliant with its specifications.
        They are a good complement to the traditional testing techniques and they are recommended by the Functional Safety standards (e.g. IEC 61508 and IEC 61511).
        The main advantage of Model Checking is that it checks all combinations in the PLC program trying to find a violation of the requirement specification.
        The main disadvantages are 2: (1) using formal methods is a complex and time consuming task; (2) the so-called "state space explosion" problem, when the number of combinations to be checked is huge.
        PLCverif hides the complexity of using formal methods from the user of the tool. In addition, it uses advanced model checking algorithms to deal with the "state space explosion" to a certain extend.

        Speaker: Borja Fernandez Adiego (CERN)
    • 17:00 17:30
      Closing session: Q&A
      Convener: Dr Enrique Blanco Vinuela (CERN)