Incorporating industrial experience to IEC 61499 based development methodologies and toolsets

The successful use of IEC 61499 in the industry requires software development processes that utilize the standard's support for best practices of software engineering, such as CORFU. The adoption of such a process would involve upgrading existing practices, tacit knowledge and legacy software, which constitute much of the core competence and essential assets of a company. This paper reports on a two part research that aims to manage the risk and cost of such a venture. The first part has been performed in collaboration with professionals in order to identify industrially familiar work practices for IEC 61499 based development. The second part investigates the possibility of adapting the CORFU development process into the direction of the work practices discovered in the first part.