Implementation of full synchronous composition using IEC 61499 function blocks

One reason that the development of distributed control system is hard is that the communication primitives are at a low abstraction level. To put less burden on the developer it would be an advantage to have support for high-level communication primitives. One such primitive is the full synchronous composition (FSC) operator. This operator can be used to model the interaction between an arbitrary number of concurrently executing applications. This paper shows how to implement the FSC operator using an open communication standard for distributed control systems, IEC 61499. The operator is used in the supervisory control theory, a framework for automatic generation of provable correct supervisors. In manufacturing systems, for example, the supervisor might have to interact with a physically distributed plant. This paper concludes therefore by showing how to use the proposed implementation of the FSC operator to execute a supervisor against a physically distributed plant.