Design and implementation of a prototype control system according to IEC 61499

The demands of users and markets require today's manufacturing systems to be agile and flexible. Hence, the corresponding control systems need to be adaptable, reusable and re-configurable. This motivates development of the control architectures based on the concept of software components. The international standard IEC 61499 provides a function block architecture for industrial process measurement and control systems. According to this standard, a distributed control system can be structured by means of interconnection of software components. With the help of a prototype control system, this paper describes how to design a distributed control system based on the engineering methodologies of extended model/view/controller (MVC) and layered architecture MVC according to IEC 61499. The corresponding configurations for practical application are presented, including some methods to decompose the functionality of a distributed system into several components. The integration of visualization components is discussed in detail. This paper serves as an example on how to apply the IEC 61499 standard into practice.