Development process for distributed automation systems combining UML and IEC 61499

Abstract

Distributed manufacturing is the latest engineering concept dealing with flexibility and reconfigurability in manufacturing to respond to dynamically changing market demands. IEC 61499 is the current standard in this field, defining a framework for distributed control applications. In this paper, the development process approach is focused on since the standard defines no development process guideline and offers no modelling support in the early stages of development. The solution will be divided into problem domain (user requirement), solution domain (system requirement, design specification and design analysis) and realisation domain (system development, implementation and their analysis). For the description Unified Modelling Language (UML) and IEC 61499 are employed. In addition, in the system development stage, a functionality-based approach is proposed to deal with reconfigurability by means of task scheduling used to coordinate the execution of software components.