Utilizing binary XML representations for improving the performance of the IEC 61499 configuration interface

A unified configuration interface is an important requirement for a heterogeneous distributed control environment as defined by IEC 61499. Most of the current IEC 61499 implementations solve this problem through the use of XML. Although XML is flexible, extensible, and human readable it has the main drawbacks of a great overhead and that it is elaborative to parse. A binary XML representation promises to reduce the overhead and ease the parsing process and therefore allowing to be used on small embedded control systems. This work applies three common binary XML formats to the configuration interface of IEC 61499 and compares their characteristics.