EVOLUTION CONTROL ENVIRONMENT FOR DISTRIBUTED AUTOMATION COMPONENTS

Future manufacturing is envisioned to be highly flexible and adaptable. New technologies for efficient engineering of reconfigurable systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision. Without such solutions, engineering adaptations of Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCS) will exceed the costs of engineered systems by far and the reuse of equipment will become inefficient. Especially the reconfiguration of control applications is not sufficiently solved by State-of-the-Art technology. This paper gives an overview of the use of evolution applications for downtimeless system evolution of control applications on basis of the standard IEC 61499. A new approach for the reconfiguration of IEC 61499 based control applications and the corresponding modeling is discussed. This new method significantly increases engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based IPMCS.