Reconfiguration of Distributed Embedded-Control Systems

This paper deals with distributed multiagent reconfigurable embedded-control systems following the component-based International Industrial Standard IEC61499 in which a function block (FB) is an event-triggered software component owning data and a control application is a distributed network of FBs. We define an architecture of reconfigurable multiagent systems, where a reconfiguration agent modeled by nested state machines is affected to each device of the execution environment to apply local automatic reconfigurations, and a coordination agent is proposed for any coordination between devices in order to guarantee safe and adequate distributed reconfigurations. A communication protocol is proposed in our research to handle coordinations between agents by using well-defined coordination matrices. We define, in addition, Extensible Markup Language (XML) based implementations for both kinds of agents, where XML code blocks are exchanged between devices. The contributions of the paper are applied to two benchmark production systems available in our laboratory.