Adaptable software components: Towards digital ecosystems and software evolution in the industrial automation domain

This paper proposes new type of software components for distributed automation systems that are capable of adapting to the computational load conditions by migrating to other devices. The migration is seen as a basic mechanism of bio-inspired heuristic search for more optimal overall load across distributed network of devices. The adaptable components can form digital ecologies self-configuring themselves after changes in the environment. The proposed architecture is prototyped using extended IEC 61499 distributed reference architecture. A simple use case of a baggage handling system is used for illustration.