Re-use of IEC 61131-3 Structured Text for IEC 61499

Because of the wide industrial adoption of IEC 61131-3 there exist a large amount of libraries and know-how, much of it in ST. Reusing these for IEC 61499 can greatly reduce the cost for changing to the new paradigm and allows to leverage existing investments. In this work we investigate how such a re-use can be performed. We develop a concept for IEC 61499 FBs encapsulating existing ST based IEC 61131-3 FBs and functions. Furthermore we develop transformation and design guidelines for using existing ST FBs and functions inside of IEC 61499. This not only improves an automatic transformation of IEC 61131-3 to IEC 61499 but also provides valuable input for IEC 61499 application developers as well as for the standardization committee to improve and extend IEC 61499.