Usability and Interoperability of IEC 61499 based distributed automation systems

Since IEC 61499 has reached the state of an international standard and a substantial body of research results exists the question of the authors as main intention for this paper was: Do the models of IEC 61499 solve all problems when thinking of usability and interoperability in heterogeneous system environments? The main problems discussed within the paper concern to the execution model defined for basic function blocks and the scheduling of events within function block networks.