Automating software development for distributed control systems with the OPC UA standard

The thesis discusses software engineering for heterogeneous control systems based on the OPC UA technology, also known as the IEC-62541 standard. The author researches and proves that software engineering automation for the standard allows to achieve significant economy of manufacturing costs and coherency in distributed multi-processor heterogeneous control systems and maintain them for long life-time. A new software engineering method is proposed which is compliant with the OPC UA and complementary to it in the software creation aspects. A new notation is proposed (including its graphical notation) as well as object-oriented architecture that can be directly applied in actual software projects. The proposed method was used in a software engineering framework called quasar, created by the thesis author with a number of well-documented external contributions. The method and the framework were used to efficiently create many of the key software components of the LHC accelerator experiment control systems at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). It is also used by commercial companies. Measurements are presented which quantify the reduction of software engineering costs when the method is used. Other non-measurable advantages are presented too.