Formalizing and Verifying Function Blocks Using Tabular Expressions and PVS

Many industrial control systems use programmable logic controllers (PLCs) since they provide a highly reliable, off-the-shelf hardware platform. On the programming side, function blocks (FBs) are reusable components provided by the PLC supplier that can be combined to implement the required system behaviour. A higher quality system may be realized if the FBs are pre-certified to be compliant with an international standard such as IEC 61131-3. We present an approach to formalizing FB requirements using tabular expressions, and to verifying the correctness of the FBs implementations in the PVS proof environment. We applied our approach to the example FBs of IEC 61131-3 and identified issues in the standard: ambiguous behavioural descriptions, missing assumptions, and erroneous implementations.