Reconfigurable control in distributed automation systems

Future manufacturing is envisioned to be highly flexible and adaptable. New technologies for efficient engineering of safe, fault-tolerant and downtimeless systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision. Without such solutions, engineering adaptations of industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCS) will exceed the costs of engineered systems by far and the reuse of equipment will become inefficient. Especially the reconfiguration of control applications is not sufficiently solved by the state-of-the-art technology. In this work an approach for a component based development of distributed, down-timeless real-time control and reconfiguration based on the standard IEC 61499 is proposed. This new method significantly increases engineering efficiency, reuse and reconfigurability in component-based IPMCS.