Towards IEC 61499 Based Distributed Intelligent Automation: Design and Computing Perspectives

The IEC 61499 standard has been proposed for development of next-generation 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 input/output. Recently IEC 61499 has been integrated with its enabling technologies to realize distributed intelligent automation for industrial cyber-physical systems. In this paper, two perspectives are provided through analysis of recent research: a) design paradigms for IEC 61499, including object-oriented design, component-based design, and service-oriented architecture; and b) computing paradigms for IEC 61499, including distributed intelligence, autonomic computing, and cloud computing. Future research trends are also outlined as a conclusion.