IEC 61499 Distributed Design Patterns

IEC 61499 emerged as a language for modeling distributed control systems. An Application is a platform-independent model that is comprised of modular components. High reusability of these components and high reconfigurability of the underlying system configuration can only be achieved with advanced design patterns. We show two example implementations of such designs and extended a pattern to foster reuse. All designs are compared based on a set of evaluation criteria. We show that our proposed design provides improved understandability and adaptability, while maintaining a slim library with highly reusable Function Block types.