Contract-Based Design for Low-Code Development in Industrial Edge Applications

The difficulty of software development for the industrial cyber-physical system is continuously increasing due to a higher level of integration between field devices and computer systems. In addition, process engineers with field expertise usually do not have strong programming skills while software engineers are not familiar with industrial domain knowledge. A new software development paradigm is needed to improve efficiency and eliminate the barriers between process engineers and software engineers. This paper proposes a low-code development method based on contracts and the IEC 61499 standard for industrial edge applications. Contracts are introduced for describing the obligations and rights of operations in a manufacturing process. Contracts are also used for automatic modular code generation based on IEC 61499 function blocks to achieve better reliability, flexibility and reusability of industrial edge applications. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated by a case study of a car manufacturing line.