The future of industrial automation and IEC 614993 standard

The design of Automation and Control Systems shows a consolidated tendency towards what has been called Distributed Intelligence. This concept has proven to be appropriate to meet the current requirements imposed on production systems, aimed at optimizing the agility to respond to disturbances and productive environment; and enhance the reconfigurability of control systems and processes. Within the theoretical conceptions of the emergent Intelligent Automation, such as Agents, the Holonic Systems, Fractal Manufacturing stand above the rest. The theoretical concept should lead to availability of technological tools that enable its implementation. According to the previous idea, the IEC 61499 standard has been established approaches from intelligent distributed components. This comes as standard programming method that will surely pass the current forms of algorithm design for programmable logic controllers, whose languages are normalized by traditional IEC 61131-3. This paper aims to show how the recent standard is compatible with the adoption of new paradigms of automation, and illustrate the concepts of distributed intelligence and autonomy that could be implemented through algorithms with new structures of Function Blocks, compiled on some programmable controllers such as PLC.