Different perspectives [Face to face; "IEC 61499 architecture for distributed automation: The `"glass half full" view

Alois Zoitl, Valeriy Vyatkin
2009 IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine  
C ontrol and automation systems in factory automation are developed using the procedural and device-centric paradigms. The always-increasing complexity of systems in this domain, as well as the need for agility, flexible plugand-play, extensibility, and evolution, imposes the need for new paradigms to effectively address today's requirements. The function block (FB) model, introduced by the IEC 61499 standard [1], is an attempt to open the industrial systems market and exploit current software
more » ... ngineering practices and the application-centric paradigm in this domain. The IEC 61499 standard is also an attempt to address requirements such as interoperability, portability, distribution, agility, run-time reconfigurability, higher availability, and reliability. It is supposed to 1) facilitate the exchange of design information between designers and fabrication houses and 2) allow the designers to integrate competing vendors' tools and reduce the risk of relying on proprietary languages and data formats. However, even though the standard has been officially accepted by 2005, it is not yet adopted by the industry [2]-[4], and its status in the academic research community is questionable. In this article, the current status of the standard is described, and its drafting process as well as its validation prior to implementation is commented. Facts and fallacies are presented and properly discussed to IEC 61499 Architecture for Distributed Automation: The "Glass Half Full" View by Alois Zoitl and Valeriy Vyatkin C ontrol software is the main element in today's industrial automation system for providing correct and safe operation of the automation process. Furthermore, requirements such as flexibility, adaptability, or robustness, envisaged in the visionary study from the Iacocca Institute [1], largely increase the complexity of the control software to the extent where the existing design methods fail. Therefore, new means of developing the control software are necessary. With the new family of standards for distributed automation systems, called IEC 61499 [2]-[4], the IEC tried to proactively anticipate and fulfill these new and upcoming demands. The standard has been available since 2005 and has attracted substantial research attention, resulting in many publications (see surveys in [5] and [6]) and several reference implementations [7]. However, its industrial adoption is rather low. The main reasons for the slow adoption are unresolved semantic issues [8], lack of clear application and development guidelines, and missing industrial-grade implementation platforms [6]. The standard is hard to read and contains some ambiguities. Furthermore, only limited tutorial information on IEC 61499 is available. Just two books explaining the ideas of IEC 61499 were published to date: [9] and [10]. However, the first of these two is a little outdated as it considers the first draft version
doi:10.1109/mie.2009.934789 fatcat:ofy6ezl625d7rcvp4apebxl3vu