No abstract

Developers maintaining distributed control systems are facing significant problems when dealing with changing customer requirements during the development and operation of industrial production facilities. Research has so far largely focused on implementation-level engineering challenges. Model-driven approaches are seen as promising for dealing with the increasing complexity of adapting distributed control systems. We present an approach for capturing architectural variability of distributed IEC 61499 automation and control systems based on product line variability models. Our automated approach supports decision-driven derivation and adaptation of systems at runtime.

No abstract

Over the past decade, a clear trend toward distributed automation in industrial systems was observable. This means that applications are executed at heterogeneous control devices and communication networks. One of the main drivers of this development was the availability of cheap computing and communication resources. Moreover, a strong market demand for operation and adaptation of automation and control services with no downtime is also often requested. As a result, appropriate approaches recovering and (re)configuring automation and control devices as well as even their services and functions during full operation are needed. The relatively new standard IEC 61499 "Function Blocks" provides a reference model for the development and implementation of distributed industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCSs). It provides a scalable and open architecture to model distributed automation and control applications. The high-level goals of IEC 61499 can be summarized as interoperability, (re)configurability, and portability of distributed applications for IPMCS. Therefore, it provides a very good basis for dynamic (re)configuration and recovery of applications and status information in heterogeneous IPMCS and may master some of the shortcomings of present-day systems. The main purpose of this paper is to present and discuss a general concept for autonomous recovery of applications within the context of distributed automation and control systems which has been implemented using the IEC 61499 reference model. Index Terms-Automatic application recovery, distributed intelligent automation, holonic manufacturing system (HMS), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61499, industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCSs), lower level control (LLC), (re)configuration.

No abstract