On the suitability of object-oriented models for industrial logic controllers

The paper presents a discussion on the practical issues of applying object-oriented modeling and formal verification techniques to the design of Manufacturing Systems logic controllers. In particular, the semantical aspects of specification languages like UML and Statecharts. which are widely used in many areas of Software Engineering, are analysed in terms of their adequacy for the industrial domain Then, the paper presents the results of an application of these modeling languages to a practical case, showing that model checking techniques can also be adopted, given an adequate and domain-speciSc semantics of the object-oriented design model.