Towards the conformance Analysis of IEC 61131-3 PLC Programming Tools

Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems are used in most of the industrial sectors to achieve production improvement, process optimization and time and cost reduction. Integration, reuse, flexibility and optimization are demanded to adapt to a rapidly changing and competitive market. In fact, standardization is a key goal to achieve these goals. The international standardization efforts have lead to the definition of the IEC 61131 standard. Part 3 of this standard defines a software model for defining automation projects as well as 5 programming languages. Nowadays, a major part of Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) vendors follows this standard, although each programming tool adds particularities and stores the automation project in different manner. This work presents an approach for analyzing the conformance to the IEC 61131-3 standard of a programming tool. The conformance analyser is designed at different levels, covering the data types, programming languages and software architecture. Besides, within each level of conformance, different sublevels can be certified.