A Three-Tier Design Approach for a Family of Large AC Drive Control Systems

Software for large embedded systems (e.g. control systems for locomotives or large industrial drives) consumes a steadily increasing proportion of the engineering costs for development and maintenance. For this reason our goal is to share the effort by developing software that fits for several related products or product families. Not only the implementation, but also the software architecture and design shall be reused in similar applications. Replacing a hardware component or adding a customer desired feature in an application shall result in very limited changes in the control system software. As a solution for this common situation this paper defines a layered software architecture, which is designed for maximum reuse on different levels. The paper illustrates the internals of the common software layer, describes how it is used to build variants for different drive topologies, and how the lower layers were designed for fast application building.