Design Alternatives in the IEC 61499 Function Block Model

The International Electro-technical Commission through the 61499 standard establishes the basic infrastructure towards an open market in the control and automation domain. This standard can be considered as the first step towards the development of the next generation agile manufacturing systems where distribution, interoperability and re-configuration are between the most important requirements. However, even though many researchers are working during last years towards this direction, the understanding of the use of the IEC 61499 between practitioners is weak. The standard has many open issues regarding the design views that are required for an effective design process for distributed control systems. In this paper, the inefficiencies of IEC 61499, at least as far as the design phase is considered, are highlighted and the way that these inefficiencies can be addressed is discussed. A laboratory system, the FESTO modular production system, is used as a running example to demonstrate possible design alternatives.