A Migration Path to IEC 61499 for the Batch Process Industry

Many recent contributions in the field of embedded, networked control and collaborative manufacturing, such as dynamic reconfiguration, are based on the IEC 61499 standard, which defines a general-purpose architecture for control applications. The industrial acceptance of the standard remains unclear at this time, largely because there is no obvious way to apply domain-specific, industrially accepted engineering methodologies and concepts in the context of IEC 61499. This paper proposes a way to support the established practices of the batch process domain with IEC 61499, and assesses the feasibility of the approach with an experiment involving professional designers.