Integration of existing IEC 61131-3 systems in an IEC 61499 distributed solution

The IEC 61499 standard allows to model and design new generation control systems, providing innovative concepts of software engineering (such as abstraction, encapsulation, reuse) to the world of control engineering. The industrial reception of the standard, however, is still in an early stage, also because its introduction results in the adoption of a programming paradigm profoundly different than the widespread IEC 61131-3. This paper presents a method for the integration of the two standards, that allows to exploit the benefits of both. The proposed architecture is based on the parallel execution of both environments that interact with each other through some specific interfaces. A test implementation of the architecture is also presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution.