Specification of Function Block Applications with UML

The concept of FB based on newly appearing standard IEC 61499 originates in automation engineering and corresponds to the distributed control structure. A FB represents an abstraction of a software functional unit comprising an individual data structure and associated operations. To support the mature of the FB-related design paradigm in this paper, we discuss the specification of FBs and FB applications in UML. The paper suggests three types of models which have the purposes of general specification, automated code generation and test case generation. The first and second models are specified in UML while the third one is to be formalised in certain formal language. We focus on the first two model specification in this paper which transform FB-related elements in UML expressions. This shows that the rich resources provided for UML can be applicable to FB paradigm. The characteristics and the potential use of the model are discussed.