Professional designers' adaptations of IEC 61499 to their individual work practices

Abstract

The IEC 61499 standard enables a number solutions to the same application development problem, and this can result in components that are incompatible even though they are standards based. IEC 61499 underpins a vision for an open object-oriented knowledge economy, so the application of component-based software development principles needs further research. Such principles are not broadly used in the industry, so our goal is to understand how industrial practice needs to be changed. What are the practices that need to be replaced before the object-oriented, component-based paradigm can be accepted? We organized an intensive course on IEC 61499, where professionals and researchers automated a process in teams. Our results show that the background of a designer has a strong impact on the choice of the problem solving approach, and that this can prevent the use of many new and progressive features in IEC 61499