Towards cloud-based virtual commissioning of distributed automation applications with IEC 61499 and containerization technology

The need of manufacturing industries to adapt to the demand from customers and the volatile market drives the need for digitalization to realize the so-called smart factory. Smart factory, Compared to traditional factories, smart factory needs to possess high flexibility and stability and often has to employ digital twin. Compared to IEC 61131-3 standard used in traditional industrial production, IEC 61499 standard can bring more advantages to meet the realization of Smart Factory, such as flexibility, distribution and event-driven execution. In this paper, we propose a new Virtual Commissioning (VC) architecture for IEC 61499-based control applications. We build an online collaborative VC platform with the help of cloud computing and containerization technologies. Furthermore, we discuss and propose the utilization of soft-PLC containers from different vendors to meet users’ commissioning requirements for different hardware configurations. Compared with the traditional offline single-person debugging method, our proposed architecture can improve the flexibility, collaboration and efficiency of control software debugging in a more interactive and collaborative style via the online platform we implemented.