A Design Pattern for Monitoring Adapter Connections in IEC 61499

Today's software developments are frequently structured into different components with well defined interfaces. IEC 61499 comes with well defined interface mechanisms such as adapters that group data and event exchange between different subsystems. Compliance with interface specifications can be monitored at run-time. In this paper we present a design pattern to monitor adapters thereby observing whether communication specifications are fulfilled. We present an example demonstrating monitoring of a handshaking mechanism used between control application components.