This paper deals with the possibility of introducing exception handling mec
hanisms into the specification and code of industrial process control softw
are. Although exception handling is a very important aspect of process cont
rol applications, in most cases it is treated in an ad hoc and unstructured
manner - which is mainly caused by the lack of appropriate constructs in p
rogramming languages for programmable logic controllers. A high degree of m
astery of the development process can be achieved by applying an engineerin
g process based upon life cycle and domain engineering concepts. The main r
esult of domain engineering is a conceptual model of the domain in question
. One of the elements of the conceptual model is the specification language
with a defined exception handling construct. The exception handling constr
uct is illustrated by a real application excerpt. It would be useful to inc
lude this exception handling construct into the Structured Text controller
programming language. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.