Design and implementation of a prototype control system according to IEC 61499

The demands of users and markets require today´s manufacturing systems to be agile and flexible. Hence, the corresponding control systems need to be adaptable, reusable and re-configurable. This motivates development of the control architectures based on the concept of software components. The international standard IEC 61499 provides a function block architecture for industrial process measurement and control systems. According to this standard, a distributed control system can be structured by means of interconnection of software components. With the help of a prototype control system, this paper describes how to design a distributed control system based on the engineering methodologies of extended model/view/controller (MVC) and layered architecture MVC according to IEC 61499. The corresponding configurations for practical application are presented, including some methods to decompose the functionality of a distributed system into several components. The integration of visualization components is discussed in detail. This paper serves as an example on how to apply the IEC 61499 standard into practice.