Hierarchical and cooperative approaches to logic control design in industrial automation

In this work a general partitioning of logic control design strategies into two main approaches, cooperative and hierarchical, is proposed and some lines for a comparison are drawn. In the authors’ opinion, the cooperative approach basically collects methods inspired by IEC 61499 and agent paradigms while, the hierarchical approach, generally collects design procedures inspired by IEC 61131. Among the elements of the latter category, particular attention is devoted to the design methodology based on the Generalized Actuator framework, recently proposed by the authors. A case-study is considered to derive some starting considerations on the properties of the considered approaches.