In the past, automation systems were hardly considered for changes during their lifetime due to their complexity. However, nowadays, their integration with other systems in time is considered as an important issue at design. In addition, automation applications demand new capabilities such as dynamic configuration or run-time reconfiguration in response to process changes or alarms. New methodologies are necessary in order to face these requirements. Component-based technologies, originally

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... oduced in the software engineering industry aimed at obtaining efficient, structured and reusable designs, proved to be useful. In this paper we introduce an IEC 61499-based framework capable of dealing with reconfiguration issues. A new abstraction layer is introduced to carry out communication between components: the communication channel. The proposed framework allows the combination of automation components and communication channels in order to ease the design and implementation of complex IEC 61499 compliant distributed systems.