The reconfiguration of control software is regarded as an important ability to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency in future manufacturing systems. Agent technology is considered as a promising approach to provide reconfiguration abilities, but existing work has been focused mainly on the reconfiguration of higher layers concerned with production scheduling and planning. In this paper, we present an automation agent architecture for controlling physical components that integrates “on the fly” reconfiguration abilities on the low-level layer. Our approach is combined with an ontological representation of the low-level functionality at the high-level control layer, which is able to reason and initiate reconfiguration processes to modify the low-level control (LLC). As current control systems are mostly based on standards and principles that do not support reconfiguration, leading to rigid control software architectures, we base our approach on the promising Standard IEC 61499 for the LLC, extended by an innovative reconfiguration infrastructure. We demonstrate this approach with a case study of a reconfiguration process that modifies the LLC functionality provided by the automation agent of a physical component. Thereby, we obtain the ability to support numerous different LLC configurations without increasing the LLC's complexity. By applying our automation agent architecture, we enhance not only the flexibility of each component's control software, but also achieve the precondition for reconfiguring the entire manufacturing system.

This paper intends to provide a basis for the discussion and development of an Open Source Initiative for a ldquoFramework for distributed industrial automation and control (4DIAC) based on the new IEC 61499 standard. The general understanding of the authors is that an open source strategy is an adequate means for pushing current developments within the industrial automation domain and bringing together interested partners to focus and unite their concerns on a distributed and flexible automation environment. One main point is also to provide a stable basis for industrial appliances and further research into next generation distributed automation and control systems based on the IEC 61499 standard. A look at the current status of the developments for IEC 61499 shows, that these targets may not have been attained. In the opinion of the authors, the targets presented above need a common and publicly available reference framework. Therefore the general idea of the 4DIAC initiative is to provide such an open framework for the IEC 61499 standard that gives the opportunity to establish an automation and control environment based on the three main targets, portability, configurability and interoperability.

The IEC 61499 modeling language pursues a component-based approach with modular building blocks coupled by ports and arranged in a hierarchical manner. Like similar approaches, the IEC 61499 language does not define how functional hierarchies of upper- and lower-level functional entities should be built. In this paper we outline structuring principles for IEC 61499 programs with purely hierarchical control architectures. We present elementary design guidelines for structuring automation solutions in several hierarchical layers, outline which elements of the IEC 61499 language to use, discuss patterns that arise when implementing hierarchical control solutions, and illustrate the approach with a case study.

Production systems will become increasingly complex to handle flexible business processes and systems. Engineering systems and tools from several sources have to cooperate for building agile component-based systems. While there are approaches for the technical integration of component-based industrial automation systems, there is only little work on the effective and efficient integration of engineering tools and systems along the automation systems lifecycle. In this paper we introduce the concept of the ldquoautomation service busrdquo (ASB) based on technical and semantic integration concepts for general software engineering tools and systems. Based on real-world use cases from automation systems engineering we discuss the state of the art, innovation benefits and limitations of the ASB concept, and derive research issues for further work.

The standard IEC 61499 claims to be a standard for a distributed control environment consisting of a set of heterogeneous control devices from different vendors. Previous work on the implementation of IEC 61499 pointed out ambiguities in the standard, resulting in different execution behavior of IEC 61499 elements on different control devices. One of the key deficiencies is the lack of a definition for execution models of the device, the resource, and the function blocks. This paper discusses different design and execution issues related to the aforementioned problems for IEC 61499 distributed automation and control systems.