Formal design of distributed control systems with lustre

Abstract

During the last decade, the synchronous approach has proved to meet industrial needs concerning the development of Distributed Control Systems (DCS): as an example, Schneider Electric has adopted the synchronous language Lustre and the associated tool Scade for developing monitoring systems for nuclear power plants. But so far, engineers make use of Lustre- Scade for designing separately single components of a DCS. This paper focuses on the use of Lustre-Scade for designing DCS as a whole. Two valuable consequences of this approach are that (1) the same framework can be used for both programming, simulating, testing and proving properties of a distributed system, and (2) the proposed approach is fully consistent with the usual engineering abstractions concerning smooth signals.