Esterel Technologies>Industries>Industrial & Energy

Industrial and Energy Production

As the global economy struggles to meet the energy demands of today while planning for the future, a clear focus on safety, reliability, and energy efficiency is prevalent in the industrial and energy production domains. In the industrial sector, applications must be smarter to minimize fuel consumption, be environmentally conscientious, and ultimately safe to the end-users and the community. Likewise, in the process of energy production itself, systems must be smarter to maximize energy production while keeping the environment and the operators of these systems safe. To the embedded software engineering community producing these applications, these demands require formal development processes, standards, tools, and methodologies.

Standards and Certification within Industrial and Energy Domains

In the industrial domain where machines perform the work, software development teams often are required to adhere to the IEC 61508 standard and the appropriate safety integrity level(SIL), depending on the level of risk reduction required for the function, SIL 4 being the least risk or most dependable. In the energy production domain such as for nuclear instrumentation and controls, developers look to IEC 60880 for development process and guidelines. These standards prescribe risk reduction, keeping safety always in mind while developing the software that controls and monitors safety-critical applications. Many software development organizations either have moved or are moving to formal model-based development (FMBD) which intrinsically supports these software development standards. Formal model-based development maintains developer efficiency and productivity while ensuring the end product is safe and meets the performance needs of the application. Manual software development techniques or informal tools and methodologies no longer suffice as they remain error prone and rely on late-in-process testing where finding a defect late could mean hugely expensive rework, or worse, compromises in terms of functionality and safety.

How Esterel Technologies and SCADE Can Help

Esterel Technologies solutions, including the SCADE® product family and accompanying professional services have helped companies such as AREVA NP, Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC), Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research (IGCAR), Liebherr, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL), Nuclear Power Institute of China (NPIC), Rolls-Royce Civil Nuclear, Korea Power Engineering Company (KOPEC) and Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) address the software development challenges with nuclear instrumentation and control and industrial applications. SCADE has been used in the design and development of nuclear instruments and controls in Armenia, Belgium, China, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and France. SCADE products provide developers of safety-critical systems an optimized model-based development environment specifically designed for critical application development. SCADE Suite® and SCADE Display® provide formal, unambiguous model-based development, enabling correct-by-construction designs for critical embedded control applications and critical embedded graphics display applications such as control stations, respectively. With this formal model-based approach, developers of critical systems no longer need to wait for late-in-process testing and verification to ensure their system is safe and meets the intended requirements. Developers can efficiently create model-based designs that are formal, unambiguous, and correct-by-construction. Because of the rigorous semantics, SCADE provides verification and certified/qualified code generation technology that improves design reusability, maintainability, and developer productivity. With SCADE, requirements are easily traced into and throughout the design process with design documentation guaranteed to always up-to-date. SCADE connects the entire lifecycle development tool-chain and improves communication and collaboration among the development team members.

Proven in Industrial and Energy Production

Critical applications that have been developed using SCADE include:

• Reactor Protection Systems
  • Reactor limitation
  • Trip process and emergency shutdown
  • Safety actuation
• Nuclear Instrumentation
  • Power measurement
  • Heating controllers
  • Neutron instrumentation
• Other Safety Systems
  • Safety valve control
  • Rod control
  • Diesel sequencing
  • Rod position instrumentation
• Industrial Applications
  • Excavators
  • Tractors
  • Earth moving machines
  • Mining equipment
  • Automotive steering and braking systems

SCADE Benefits in Industrial and Energy Production

• Formal, unambiguous graphical design entry improves communication and collaboration among international development teams, suppliers, and OEMs
• Increased developer productivity while addressing safety requirements and mitigating risk with correct-by-construction design, automated verification, and certified code generation
• Improved reusability and maintainability through model-based design
• Seamless, consistent workflow with fully integrated tool-chain and life-cycle support