Defining IEC 61499 Compliance Profiles using UML and OCL

IEC 61499 holds its distinct identity as a standard modeling language for distributed control applications in the realm of Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCSs). From the perspective of modeling distributed control applications it seems to be a fitting standard unless one tries to map the models into implementations on any of the diverse hardware platforms available for IPMCS. UML often seems to be a modeling counterpart of IEC 61499. Due to its wide-spread application in different domains UML is now enriched enough with artifacts like standard profiles and hence more expressive. Moreover, its familiarity inspired researchers to draw modeling similes with IEC 61499. In this context the presented work tries to present the aspects of UML artifacts to specify IEC 61499 models to avoid certain ambiguities that might widen the gap between model and implementation. Moreover, considering the fact that the model of IEC 61499 resources and its mapping to implementation determines how the constituent element should behave in the application, a modeling paradigm for resources - taking into account the execution semantics (profile) - in terms of UML is also proposed. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the ambiguity of textual representation is sufficiently avoided. Furthermore, the definition in terms of constraints (OCL) allows checking a model for consistency with a given profile.