A Distributed Control Environment for Reconfigurable Manufacturing

Future manufacturing is envisioned to be highly flexible and adaptable. New technologies for efficient engineering of safe, fault-tolerant and downtimeless systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision. Without such solutions, engineering adaptations of Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) will exceed the costs of engineering the initial system by far and the reuse of equipment will become inefficient. In this work a new approach for a model driven, component based development of distributed, downtimeless real–time control, the controlled evolution of IACS and their execution during their adaptation based on the standard IEC 61499 is proposed. This new method increases engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based IACS significantly.