Communication types for manufacturing systems. A proposal to distributed control system based on IEC 61499

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has defined the standard IEC 61499 for the next generation of distributed control systems used in agile manufacturing systems. This work identifies and characterizes different types of communications needed for distributed control. It simplifies application designers work and middleware implementation for the standard. Then, a proposal is presented for a distributed system based on a FB model and the types of communication identified and it is evaluated in a real application.