Developing a monitoring infrastructure for IEC 61499 devices

In order to cope with the upcoming demands for flexible adaptive production system a new architecture for industrial automation systems has been introduced called IEC 61499. Up to now no monitoring and debugging infrastructure has been defined for IEC 61499 although, this is a key feature for industrial automation systems as break downs and unexpected standstills needs to be solved immediately. To improve this situation this work evaluates whether existing IEC 61499 means can be used for monitoring and debugging. As existing means are either not powerful enough or not suitable for small embedded control devices a new monitoring and debugging approach is developed. The developed infrastructure has been implemented as part of the 4DIAC open source framework. Testing the new monitoring and infrastructure showed that it is capable of fulfilling the requirements and that it greatly improves distributed control system development.