Guest Editorial: Special section on software engineering in industrial automation

A CCORDING to many undisputable evidences, the complexity and importance of software in industrial automation systems is growing with a tremendous rate, making software engineering one of the major activities of automation systems developers. In general, software engineering is an established discipline with its methods, traditions and curriculum. Most of its methods and tools are applicable across different domains, from general purpose computing to real-time control of manufacturing automation systems. On the other hand, there is colloquial opinion of software design in automation mainly consisting of programmable logic controllers (PLC) programming in primitive languages, such as ladder logic, done in front of the machine. In the past years, researchers all over the world dedicated much effort to develop and apply advanced software engineering methods and concepts in the industrial automation domain. The research on this subject has followed many directions, for example, component-based design architectures, object-oriented and aspect-oriented design methods and agile development. These methods aim at more efficient construction of software. The emergent ones include the technologies aiming at automatic composition of software functionalities (online or offline) achieved on account of multi-agent collaboration, the use of web-services, or automatic reasoning. These technologies provide for flexibility and plug-and-play composition of software which is enabled by such mechanisms as multi-agent collaboration and service discoveries. It is our pleasure to present this Special Section on Software Engineering in Industrial Automation of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, which reports the state-of-the-art on the subject, including review papers and new contributions to this field. This Special Section, covers a wide range of subjects, namely, formal foundations of software engineering, automatic synthesis of programs, the use of knowledge intensive Semantic Web models in manufacturing automation, multi-agent technologies, novel synergies between model-driven engineering and aspect-oriented design and design patterns. Also, the issues related to dependability and correct by design methods are discussed. This Special Section is opened by paper [1] that proposes a novel approach for controller synthesis on shop-floor level for discrete-event systems. Despite the paper's own merits, another reason for including the paper into the first position in this Special Section was the desire to emphasize the important role and potential of rigorous formal methods in this research area. Formal models of software systems create the firm foundation of software engineering. This is especially true for the industrial automation branch of software engineering. The purpose of design is to create dependable software with …