Enhancing the Resilience of IEC 61131–3 Software With Online Reconfigurations for Fault Handling

In automated production, resilience describes a system’s capacity to absorb disturbances by reconfiguring itself, thus retaining its Overall Equipment Effectiveness at least partially. This includes online behavior reconfiguration to automatically recover from or prevent faults, collectively called fault handling. Promising research exists for fault handling in automated Production Systems. In process engineering, fault diagnosis and automatic parameter adaptions are already industrially available. However, handling faults in discrete manufacturing requires a series of distinct operations, which cannot be achieved by parameter changes alone. Further, core requirements must remain fulfilled by automatic fault handling approaches, including real-time control and extra-functional requirements like changing operation modes, monitoring interlocks, and an alarming and communication system. This article proposes a concept for reconfigurable IEC 61131–3 software for automatic fault handling, validated by a public reference implementation for a demonstrator, an industrial production system, and a modified industrial test rig. Eight experiments were successfully conducted, showcasing four use cases of the concept: The prevention of faults by avoiding anomalous components, the recovery from a fault state to automatic operation, the definition of previously undefined state variables, and the monitoring of global interlocks to trigger a controlled stop. All mentioned extra-functional requirements are fulfilled. Note to Practitioners—Identification, reporting, diagnosis, and recovery of faults in automated production incur substantial effort. Project-specific code is required for diagnosis, and the recovery and re-initialization are often performed manually. To our knowledge, automatic recovery approaches from scientific literature are not widely used in discrete manufacturing. Reasons may include a frequent disregard of extra-functional requirements mentioned above. Further, some approaches are incompatible with IEC 61131–3 or industry-typical software modularization. This article proposes a PLC software concept that aims to be compatible with real-world challenges and solutions. The functional software is vertically modularized from organizational hardware-level code. The horizontal modularization separates devices or equipment groups. Support for multiple changing operation modes including two types of controlled stop (run to completion or abort), alarming, data exchange, and global interlocks are incorporated. A prototypical IEC 61131–3 implementation is publicly available that separates a reusable generic part from hardware-specific and project-specific code. The resulting control code is highly reusable, such that all modes (derived from PackML), including dynamic reconfigurations, are composed from the same software modules. Note that we do not expect the concept to be well-adoptable in continuous processes, as elaborated in the Preliminaries section.