Marco Colla

Applying the IEC-61499 Model to the Shoe Manufacturing Sector

This paper presents a new execution model and a concrete application of the IEC 61499 standard in the larger context of a currently running European project, which seeks to preserve shoe-manufacturing activities in Europe through the development of advanced production systems. The present work summarizes an analysis of current practices and research activities in the domain of the design of distributed control systems, and proposes an original design framework made of existing and ad-hoc developed tools, and based on the IEC 61499 standard. As this standard does not prescribe any execution model, we suggest an innovative solution for the implementation level of such distributed control systems. At the end, we present the design choices and some experience gained using the IEC 61499 standard for the design of the automation system of a real plant.

A research roadmap for model-driven design of embedded systems for automation components

The aim of this paper is to describe a research roadmap for a multi-domain model-driven embedded systems design approach and the corresponding meta-model which is applicable to the domain of complex Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS). The special requirements of the industrial automation sector are taken into account by this novel approach, utilizing existing model-driven techniques. This approach is currently being developed in the Framework Seven (FP7) Embedded Systems Design project MEDEIA funded by the European Commission.

Execution Models for the IEC 61499 elements Composite Function Block and Subapplication

The semantic loopholes of the standard IEC 61499 have been pointed out in different recent publications with focus on some details. This paper investigates especially on the execution models for composite function blocks and subapplications. Of course this is closely related to the execution of basic function blocks and function block networks. Therefore, this work is based on general assumptions about these parts. The different possibilities concerning composite function blocks are described in detail and explained in a case study of a very simple example function block. For the sake of describing the relation to current runtime environments, three current implementations are used in the case study.

Design and implementation of industrial automation control systems: A survey

The level of automation in factories and plants, and the need for their fast design and customization, increases steadily. These systems are often designed with various means, and controlled by heterogeneous embedded hard- and software. These circumstances raise the problem complexity and the time to be invested. The state-of-the art and the trends in design and engineering for the industrial automation have not yet provided an applicable solution to the mentioned issues. Hence a new European project tries to overcome the previous problems with a new component based approach for automatically linking the design and implementation phases. This document resumes and analyses the results of a survey conducted among the project industrial partners about their current design and implementation processes. What emerges is the need and the lack of connection, and even transformation rules, between the two aforementioned processes.

A Device and Resource Execution Model for IEC 61499 Control Devices

The standard IEC 61499 claims to be a standard for a distributed control environment consisting of a set of heterogeneous control devices from different vendors. Previous research work on the implementation of IEC 61499 pointed out so-called loopholes in the definitions of the standard resulting in different execution behaviour on different control devices. One of the key loopholes that have been identified is the lack of a definition for execution models of the device and the resource. With this work a step towards a more rigid definition of the execution semantics for IEC 61499 through the derivation of execution models for resources and devices.

Event-driven Scheduling for Parallel Stream Processing

To optimize real-time stream-processing applications for chip-level multi processors, several challenges have to be met. Poor scalability and poor internal data pressure may result from serial dependencies within or between the algorithms. Load imbalances introduced by the parallel-processing hardware and execution environment may also limit performance. To maximize the throughput and minimize the latency of parallel stream-processing applications, we propose an approach that complements run-time dynamic load balancing with static pre-compile partitioning. In our solution, the dynamic features are based on event-driven scheduling, while the static features benefit from profile-guided automatic optimizations. In this paper, we present some recent enhancements of DSPE, an open-source development environment, featuring model and source code generators for prototyping, refining and customizing real-time stream-processing applications. By using our approach on micro-benchmarks and sample applications, we also show that it is possible to reduce the impact of the different speed-up constrainers.

CEC designer: Domain specific modelling for the industrial automation based on the IEC 61499 standard

Support for evolutionary design approaches is not a very much investigated topic in the automation domain. Advanced facilities for semantic validation, refactoring and model transformations, which are necessary for rapid prototyping of control applications, are seldom found in design tools. Implementing such facilities is even more difficult when using the IEC 61499 standard, through some characteristics of the persistence model. This paper presents a specialized development environment for modelling and automatically generating applications for the industrial automation field, its unique facilities for supporting evolutionary design and the suggested improvements to the IEC 61499 model. This environment was developed inside a project for assessing the IEC 61499 principles and for verifying design approaches and execution models on a real plant.

RTAI-based execution environments for function block based control applications

The IEC 61499 standard has been recently adopted to promote a more flexible development process in the control and automation domain. The standard mainly deals with modeling issues leaving a lot of model execution details open. Different research groups are already working for the development of execution environments for the defined component model, proposing implementations with different execution semantics. This paper discuss the semantics of the execution environment and presents two execution environments, which although independently developed share a similar view of IEC61499 execution semantics and are both implemented over RTAI (real time application interface), a real-time Linux-based platform.

Flexible Automated Island for (Dis) Assembly of a Variety of Silicon Solar Cell Geometries for Specialist Solar Products

The demand for non-standard, custom design, solar products is rapidly increasing with a growing number of companies wanting to incorporate sustainable energy solutions into their products. The FP7 funded white’R project aims to move away from the current manual assembly processes by developing a new automated manufacturing tool, capable of tabbing and stringing a wide variety of different size and shape solar cells. The island will have the capability of scanning incoming solar cells to be (dis)assembled and associate them to a number of tasks to be executed. It will also have the intelligence to automatically recognise, select and configure the proper “Plug&Produce” (P&P) equipment to be used for the operations. To date, a reference model has been created, detailing current production processes, considered products and foreseen equipment, in order to support the configurable implementation of the island. Designs for the fixturing and storage systems along with the end effectors have been produced.