Towards IEC 61499-Based Distributed Intelligent Automation: A Literature Review

The IEC 61499 standard was proposed for distributed architecture design of industrial automation systems to support portability, interoperability, and configurability. Compared with the traditional IEC 61131-3 standard, it provides an open reference architecture with some key features-object-oriented modeling by using function blocks as basic elements and event-driven execution by using data/events as inputs/outputs. In order to make IEC 61499 more applicable in industrial practices, researchers have been focusing on its transformation methods, modeling techniques, and implementation tools over the past years. In this article, three major issues are discussed through analysis of recent research: 1) how existing systems programmed in IEC 61131-3 can be transitioned to IEC 61499-based systems; 2) how IEC 61499 has integrated with enabling technologies for distributed intelligent automation; and 3) how engineering environments for IEC 61499 have been implemented. In detail, the article starts with challenges in the transition to and methods of transformation to IEC 61499-based systems, goes further into design and computing paradigms for IEC 61499 function block modeling, and ends with developments and applications of IEC 61499 engineering environments. Discussions and future research trends are outlined as a conclusion.