Specification of manufacturing systems controllers using the standard IEC61499

The IEC developed the 61499 standard based in function blocks allowing representing components and their interaction in distributed systems. This paper presents a methodology to automate the design of distributed controllers of discrete manufacturing systems, from a simple description of the system. The method takes advantage of the IEC-61499 facilities for deriving a modular representation, which is processed for developing a distributed controller. A case study regarding an assembly system is used to illustrate the proposed methodology; the resulting model is simulated using the FBDK software tool.