Paradigms for unified runtime systems in industrial automation

Borders between different levels of the industrial automation pyramid become more and more blurry because of the increasing production flexibility and plant complexity. The arising challenges can be overcome by the use of the same runtime systems and programming paradigms for distributed automation at the manufacturing execution system, the process control and the field device levels. Paradigms for unified runtime system are proposed involving message-based communication, co-existence of cyclic/event-based execution semantics of function block diagrams, a flexible hierarchical tasking concept, development workflow and non-functional system properties.