Automatic control application recovery in distributed IEC 61499 based automation and control systems

Modern industrial automation systems are supposed to execute applications distributed across heterogeneous networks. Additionally the market has raised a demand for downtime less operation and change of automation and control for such systems. Consequently appropriate concepts for recovering and reconfiguring devices during full operation are needed. The open standard IEC 61499 provides a scalable architecture to model applications for such distributed control systems. It supports interoperability, configurability and portability of control applications and therefore delivers the basis for online-configuration and recovery of heterogeneous systems. The main goal of this paper is to present a concept for autonomous recovery of applications within the context of distributed systems. The proposed concept facilitates the exchange of devices without any need for extra configuration. It supports an automatic recognition of new components in a distributed automation & control system and an automated up & download of control applications, user data and configuration data. The introduced approach is tested using an Ethernet-interconnected distributed demonstration system, consisting of standard personal computers with a running IEC 61499 function block development kit