Publication
Towards Using Behavior Trees in Industrial Automation Controllers.
Aleksandr Sidorenko; Mahdi Rezapour; Achim Wagner; Martin Ruskowski
In: Procedia CIRP. CIRP Conference on Manufactoring Systems (CIRP CMS-2024), located at 57th CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems 2024, May 29-31, Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, Elsevier, 2024.
Abstract
The Industry 4.0 paradigm manifests the shift towards mass customization and cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) and sets new re-
quirements for industrial automation software in terms of modularity, flexibility, and short development cycles of control programs. Though
programmable logical controllers (PLCs) have been evolving into versatile and powerful edge devices, there is a lack of PLC software flexibility
and integration between low-level programs and task-oriented control frameworks. Behavior trees (BTs) are a novel framework, which enables
rapid design of modular hierarchical control structures. It combines improved modularity with a simple and intuitive design of control logic. This
paper proposes an approach for improving the control software design by integrating BTs into PLC programs and separating hardware-related
functionalities from the coordination logic. Several integration strategies are shown. The first two integrate BTs with the IEC 61131 PLCs and
are based on the use of the PLCopen Common Behavior Model. The last one shows an event-based BTs version for the IEC 61499 controllers.
An application example demonstrates the approach. A new PLC software design improves modularity, supports better separation of concerns, and
enables rapid development and reconfiguration of the control software. It also provides a better integration of low-level PLC code and AI-based
task-oriented frameworks.