A formal component concept for the specification of industrial control systems

Motivated by the wide acceptance of component based technologies in software development, a component concept for software engineering is applied to modeling in the field of production automation. Taking the modeling of a holonic transport system as an example, it is shown, how function blocks in the sense of production automation can be understood as software engineering components. Thus, the advantages of component based modeling with respect to structuring, exchange and reuse can be transferred to systems in production automation.