The importance of software in industrial automation is continuously increasing. This is accompanied by a significant growth in its complexity. Conventional approaches in the development and maintenance of control software are already pushed to the limit and are causing unacceptably high costs. New paths must be taken to get the software for future automation systems under control.

4diac provides an environment for the development of new methods and tools. They reduce the burden on the software developer and, at the same time, support him in creating higher quality control programs.
4diac also allows evaluating these programs in an industrial grade setting. All work related to 4diac is framed in the context of the IEC 61499 standard for distributed, adaptive control and automation systems.

Based on the 4diac environment, work on the following topics is performed at fortiss:

• Studies on the use of IEC 61499 in different control applications
• Training on IEC 61499 and support for using 4diac
• Tools for handling existing code bases (refactoring) and version management in graphical modelling languages
• Software quality assurance for industrial control systems, including software testing methods (unit testing, integration testing …) and continuous integration
• Use of formal model analysis methods for direct verification of programs during the development process

Moreover, insights related to the modelling methodology of IEC 61499 that were gained during this work are transferred towards the further development of the standard.

4diac itself is open-source software and is provided royalty-free under the Eclipse Public License 1.0, which also allows for commercial use.

Project website 4diac

Integration of 4diac with Eclipse SCADA

• Overview and How-To (pdf)
• Download Sourcecode (zip)
• Youtube channel 4diac