Debugging approach for IEC 61499 control applications in FBME

With the increase in the use of distributed control systems in industrial automation, it is becoming more challenging to analyze the behavior of the system to evaluate its quality. The lack of data coming from the system during operation also complicates debugging and error finding in the system software. The paper presents a quality control method of IEC 61499 industrial control software. The proposed method is based on a combination of several techniques: monitoring of the system behavior, recovering missing data with a simulator, and explanation of the recovered traces by highlighting a sequence of events that led to the explored state of the system. The paper integrates the method into modular IDE for IEC 61499 applications FBME. We also demonstrate the method on a simple example.