Exploring Refactoring Operations for IEC 61499

In the domain of CPPS, long-term maintenance of software is necessary. Refactoring, a technique used to improve maintainability is a viable solution. However, there is a scarcity of research on refactoring in the context of CPPS. In this work, we propose a systematic approach for analyzing and deriving refactoring operations for IEC 61499. In particular, we propose a generic meta-model for block-based languages, which is accompanied by a corresponding generic refactoring catalog. Based on the generic meta-model, an existing refactoring catalog for IEC 61499 is extended by comparing and evaluating meta-models and their associated refactoring operations derived from literature of different modeling languages. We demonstrate that our approach provides a systematic way of transferring refactoring operations across block-based modeling languages and allows to extend existing refactoring collections for IEC 61499.