Industrial edge computing brings intelligent applications to traditional industrial automation systems. The support of multi-core processors has dramatically enhanced the computational capabilities of these edge devices. An edge device can simultaneously execute multiple tasks with diverse real-time constraints, from motion control to machine learning-based fault prediction. The IEC 61499 function blocks (FBs) have been adopted for the system-level modeling language for industrial edge applications. To provide prioritized deterministic concurrent execution for real-time control, computational, and other tasks, event types are enhanced with different priorities and real-time attributes in accordance with the IEC 61499 standard. The concurrent scheduling algorithm with event types is proposed to ensure determinism for the real-time execution of IEC 61499 FB networks. Finally, the proposed execution semantics are proven to significantly reduce execution time while guaranteeing the determinism of both operations and information technology tasks with multicore support.

Water scarcity has been intensified globally due to the rapid growth of economic and population. Wastewater treatment and recycling is one of the most feasible strategies for meeting the ever-increasing water usage. However, conventional centralized wastewater treatment plants are being stretched to their limits with the emerging urban structures. To mitigate this situation, this paper proposes a decentralized treatment solution for domestic wastewater leveraging the recent advancements in instrumentation, automation, and information technologies. In particular, a 60-ton adjustable secondary wastewater treatment facility has been designed as a foundation, upon which in-situ monitoring, software-centric automation system, and industrial edge-cloud computing platform have been deployed to form a holistic solution. The resultant facility has been consecutively and successfully operating onsite to date.

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems require more flexibility and resilience to meet the requirement of flexible manufacturing. Model-driven engineering methods are often linked with the development and deployment of distributed automation systems. However, most legacy systems currently do not have a system-level model or even source code, which hinders the maintenance of future-proof systems. With a huge amount of operation data collected by acquisition processes in the existing industrial systems, the system behavior model can be recovered but in an effective way. This paper proposes an automatic software behavior model recovery method based on data mining from industrial controllers. This method can recover and optimize the system models based on the state machines and largely reduce the computing power required for generating a system behavior state machine model. Finally, the proposed method was verified by the FSM model inferring and code generation using a color sorter example.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are becoming common in the industrial automation domain. In industrial CPS, distributed programmable logic controllers collaborate to control manufacturing plants. Design and analysis of such systems require a system model that covers control, computation, and communication with physical plant dynamics. This paper focuses on execution semantics for industrial CPS with the aim of providing a deterministic and platform-independent execution environment. A discrete-event-based execution semantics augmented with timestamp mechanism is proposed for IEC 61499 to provide deterministic behavior and guarantee compliance with real-time constraints for industrial CPS. The timestamped discrete-event-based execution semantics is implemented in an IEC 61499 runtime with service-enabled features. A case study of building automation system is used to prove the proposed semantics.

Requirement engineering is a crucial part of the engineering process. The traditional methods of requirement engineering are time-consuming and human-centered. A well-established software requirement description model needs to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the transformation and is also hoped to be scalable, versatile, and efficient in transformation and transmission. This paper presents a method of requirement engineering, including constricted nature language requirement input pattern, and the formalized requirement description JSON model. This method provides convenience for requirement modification and validation that can satisfy the real-time constraints of industrial cyber-physical systems.

Industrial automation systems are under evolution that heterogeneous devices are cooperating with each other to provide self-management on the shop floor. The interconnected and intelligence-enabled distributed automation systems form Industrial Cyber-Physical System. In Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems, implementations from various vendors largely reduce reusability and interoperability. A system-level executable modeling language is compulsory for industrial cyber-physical systems for providing rapid design and development. The IEC 61499 standard with common interface function blocks provides a generic system-level modeling language. In this paper, distributed motion control applications are modeled using IEC 61499 function blocks to simplify the design process. TODO.

Automatic code generation is a critical step towards flexible manufacturing processes. In the last decade, Model-Driven Engineering is commonly adopted for code generation while requiring tight coupling between the model and its corresponding code, which increases the difficulty of dynamic reconfiguration in the system. To improve the flexibility and efficiency of industrial software design and development processes, Knowledge Graph is proposed to be applied in knowledge-driven code generation process in this paper. The knowledge-driven query system can conduct parameter searching, variable calculation, ontology reasoning, and code invocation to assist code generation. In addition, a structure of domain-specific knowledge graph combined with SQL database and reasoning rules are proposed to improve performance. The feasibility of our method is demonstrated through the dynamic AGV route planning example.

Requirement Engineering (RE) is a crucial step prior to building their control program for industries. Traditional requirement engineering is time-consuming and error-prone that an optimized way is necessary to build an accurate model within fractions of a second. In this paper, an automatic software requirement modeling method is proposed to achieve fast and accurate requirement modeling. A new requirement model is designed to prove the concept. The newly designed model is designed based on the flexible object-oriented structure with process flow and constraints. Furthermore, to be compatible with the UML model format, the transformation rules and algorithm are provided. The requirement input system uses a general defined model, which is also the same format as the newly designed model, to deal with information from any input form like drawings, semiformal text and uploaded UML model files. Requirement model is further transformed into control code as illustrated in this paper.

In the facial paralysis rehabilitation training progresses, evaluation processes waste huge efforts from both patients and doctors. In the meantime, doctors' subjective opinions cause inaccuracy result. Therefore, it is urgent to construct an objective grading system to acknowledge doctors of their patients' exact situation. In this paper, a method is present to construct a hybrid grading system based considering both machine learning results and doctor experience. Firstly, an online marking system based on the web is designed to collect and analyze samples. Then, evaluation models are constructed through TensorFlow from the samples from doctor to grade patients. Finally, various models are mixed to construct the hybrid evaluation system. Results are achieved, which can preliminarily evaluate the patients for their recovery conditions. Although the accuracy is not satisfied enough, it can be seen that the method is effective in facial paralysis rehabilitation training. With improvements in models, an automatic evaluation system will be applied to the rehabilitation of patients.

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (iCPS) enables coordination between various subsystems and devices based on real-time feedback data from sensors. iCPS must react rapidly to new requirements and adjust itself to fulfill new functionalities in no time. On the software side, control programs of iCPS need to be reconfigured dynamically. An efficient way for massive reconfiguration is automatic code generation. In this paper, a knowledge-driven code generation method is experimented for software-defined iCPS. Based on sensor values, actuators are controlled by the reasoning process with support of ontological knowledge base. The results demonstrate that iCPS could be driven by rules completely without programming control software.

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (iCPS) are considered as the enabling technology for achieve Industry 4.0. One main characteristic of the iCPS is the information transparency to allow interoperability among various devices and systems. The OPC UA provides a common information model for connecting Industry 4.0 components. On the other hand, the IEC 61499 is commonly used as an executable modeling language for iCPS. The IEC 61499 function block network provides an abstract view of the system configuration. By combining IEC 61499 and OPC UA, a visual executable model for iCPS is completed. In this paper, the mapping between two standards are provided and a case study of the proposed mapping is given.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have shown its impact on medical research over last few years. Big data analysis is adopted in many medical research applications including rehabilitation after surgery. In the facial paralysis rehabilitation training progresses, traditional training processes require huge efforts from both patients and doctors. With increasing number of patients and limited resources offered by hospitals, assistance from ICT are urgently needed. In this paper, we present a cloud-based training and analysis system for facial paralysis patients and physicians that provides rehabilitation training, automatic progress review and result evaluation. A training client is developed to provide rehabilitation training as well as data collection. In addition, training results are analyzed by the cloud platform using machine learning methodologies. The cloud platform provides the automatic evaluation of rehabilitation progresses based on both feedback from training data set and input from physicians.

Downtime is a key performance index for industrial automation systems. An industrial automation system achieves maximum productivity when its downtime is reduced to the minimum. One approach to minimize downtime is to predict system faults and recover from them automatically. A cloud-based decision support system is proposed for rapid problem identifications and to assist the self-management processes. By running multiple parallel simulations of control software with real-time inputs ahead of system time, faults could be detected and corrected automatically using autonomous industrial software agents. Fault trees, as well as control algorithms, are modeled using IEC 61499 function blocks that can be directly executed on both physical controllers and cloud services. A case study of water heating process is used to demonstrate the self-healing process supported by the cloud-based decision support system.

Industrial cyber-physical systems (iCPS) provide horizontal and vertical integration between various devices and systems. With the amount of information in iCPS increasing rapidly, data storage and processing mechanism must be scalable and flexible enough to suit requirements of controllers, sensors, and actuators. In addition, collected data should be further organized as local knowledge fragments to support device-level intelligence. Distributed knowledge fragments can be linked together to provide support for decision making by adopting semantic web technologies. This paper presents a data management approach for devices that utilize the non-relational database to store and query ontological knowledge bases. The goal of this work is to provide efficient processing for enabling intelligence on machines during real-time operations.

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems enhance physical devices with control, computing and communication abilities to provide smart solutions for industrial applications. In industrial applications, data acquisition is an important topic. Based on feedback data from sensors and equipment, industrial processes could be optimized either by experienced engineers manually or smart agents automatically. The IEC 61499 standard is designed for modeling distributed automation systems that perfectly fits the scope of industrial CPS. However, real-time data acquisition is not supported by the IEC 61499 standard currently. In this paper, an extension to IEC 61499 compliance profile is proposed to support real-time data acquisition. Both client/server and peer-to-peer model are supported. The proposed extension is demonstrated using a demo car manufacturing line.

The pervasiveness and significance of software have upset its subordinate role in the original software-hardware relationship. Software has become a main factor for defining and differentiating various “things”. This has led to a new emerging technology trend called Software-defined Anything (SDx), where a system's functionality and diversity are largely characterized by its software. SDx technologies are now pervading and reshaping many industries. This work initiates the investigation on possible approaches for applying the SDx paradigm in automation and control systems. In particular, a framework consists of commodity control hardware, service-oriented control software, and a cloud computing platform has been proposed. An application in building automation and management system has been developed and deployed to demonstrate the proposed approach's feasibility.

With rapid improvement in information and communication technologies, industrial automation systems are under the revolution. Legacy industrial automation systems lack flexibility and interoperability due to multi-layered architecture. From industrial cyber-physical system point of view, a new system architecture is needed to allow vertical and horizontal integration between all devices and systems from enterprise level to sensor level. In this paper, a RESTful service-oriented architecture is proposed for industrial controllers. By adopting RESTful services over HTTP methods, better efficiency for data acquisition from sensors, actuators, and controllers is achieved. In addition, service-oriented device management for industrial controllers is also implemented along with data acquisition. The reference architecture experiments on a car manufacturing demonstration line.

An increasingly important goal of industrial automation systems is to continuously optimize physical resource utilization such as materials. Distributed automation is seen as one enabling technology for achieving this goal, in which networking controller nodes collaborate in a peer-to-peer way to form a new paradigm, namely industrial cyber-physical systems (iCPS). In order to achieve rapid response to changes from both high-level control systems and plant environment, the proposed self-manageable agent relies on the use of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) that improves flexibility and interoperability. It is enhanced by the autonomic service management (ASM) to implement software modifications in a fully automatic manner, thus achieving self-manageable and adaptive iCPS. The architecture design of the ASM is provided and integration with SOA-based execution environment is illustrated. Preliminary tests on self-management are completed using a case study of an airport baggage handling system.

Service-oriented architecture is increasingly applied in industrial cyber-physical systems to provide better flexibility and interoperability between various systems and devices. In the previous work ([3]) a service-based execution environment for IEC 61499 is proposed to enhance flexibility and interoperability in distributed automation systems. In this paper, we discuss questions raised by some readers, for example, performance overhead of the proposed method. Also, other clarifications are made in order to address possible confusions expressed in the received comments.

Industrial cyber-physical systems provide a vision of collaborative industrial automation systems with maximized flexibility and interoperability. Service-oriented architecture is considered as the key to enabling collaboration in industrial cyber-physical systems. On the device level, software components are expected to act as services that can be published and accessed from other distributed nodes. In this paper, a plug-and-play service component approach is proposed based on web service description language (WSDL) and IEC 61499 function blocks. Those services are able to be discovered by adopting device profiles for web services (DPWS). Plug-and-play software services are demonstrated on a building automation system example and future works on automatic service orchestration are discussed.

With the increasing computing power and network capacity, distributed automation systems are facing new challenges of handling massive amounts of distributed nodes within tight real-time constraints. The industrial cyber-physical systems is considered as the key to solve these complexities. In distributed industrial automation systems, there exists several execution semantics. In this paper, all existing execution semantics are summarized as a set of rules which are described by reconfigurable elements. During the simulation and verification of industrial cyber-physical systems, those rules are helpful to provide a generic runtime environment which can perform various execution semantics. This reconfigurable execution environment is demonstrated using a case study of a room lighting system.

The prospects of cyber-physical systems (CPS) have been well disseminated and recognized in diverse industries. In industrial automation domain, continuous research on CPS technologies has been funded strategically and globally. One important research challenge in industrial CPS is the modelling of physical processes in continuous domains connected with control systems in discrete domains. Such co-modelling must leverage state-of-the-art standards and tools for practicality. One feasible combination is the IEC 61499 standard for event-driven control and the Ptolemy II platform for heterogeneous model composition. Furthermore, by implementing the computational models of IEC 61499 in Ptolemy II, the behavioural discrepancies of the same IEC 61499 application under different execution semantics can be analysed. As a foundation work towards these goals, this paper investigates the principles of modelling basic IEC 61499 elements using existing Ptolemy II structures. It is aimed to provide some initial insights for engineering industrial CPS based on IEC 61499 and Ptolemy II.

Cyber-physical systems show their impacts in many areas including industrial automation. Design and analysis of cyber-physical automation systems requires an integral model that takes into account tight coordination of control, communication and physical plants dynamics, thus creating a new research domain, namely industrial cyber-physical systems. This paper proposes a new execution semantics for the IEC 61499 standard that is based on the concepts of discrete-event systems augmented with timestamping of events to guarantee real-time constraints for industrial cyber-physical systems. The proposed execution semantics is implemented in an IEC 61499 execution environment and a case study on building automation systems is used to verify the results.

In recent years, requirements for interoperability, flexibility, and reconfigurability of complex automation industry applications have increased dramatically. The adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) could be a feasible solution to meet these challenges. The IEC 61499 standard defines a set of management commands, which provides the capability of dynamic reconfiguration without affecting normal operation. In this paper, a formal model is proposed for the application of SOAs in the distributed automation domain in order to achieve flexible automation systems. Practical scenarios of applying SOA in industrial automation are discussed. In order to support the SOA IEC 61499 model, a service-based execution environment architecture is proposed. One main characteristic of flexibility-dynamic reconfiguration-is also demonstrated using a case study example.

Improvement of flexibility and interoperability is a usual concern of industrial automation systems developers. Service-oriented architecture is one approach promising improvement of flexibility and interoperability in existing distributed automation systems. However, the intelligent self-managing features cannot be fully achieved by just applying the service-oriented architecture. In order to improve efficiency and reliability of distributed automation systems, the service-oriented architecture is extended in this paper by autonomic service management. The design of the autonomic service manager is provided and some key features such as self-configuration, self-healing and self-optimization are demonstrated. The design of a flexible and interoperable execution environment is also illustrated. Some preliminary tests are completed with a case study.

In process control engineering, most requirements for the control system are conventionally specified in piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs). The process design and control requests captured in P&IDs are manually interpreted and then implemented in process automation software. This manual development highly relies on multi-disciplinary expertise and becomes laborious and error-prone for complex systems. This paper reports a study on applying model-driven approach to facilitate the engineering workflow from P&IDs to control software. The foundations of this work are the IEC 62424 standard, which bridges the gap of information exchange between process design and control engineering, and the IEC 61499 standard, which provides the distributed control architecture for process measurement and automation. The model transformation pathway from IEC 62424 P&ID to IEC 61499 application has been formally defined and then demonstrated on a case-study water heating system for a three-floor building.

The complexity and scale of automation industry applications have increased substantially in recent years, posing new challenges to fulfill growing requirements for reusability, interoperability, flexibility and reconfigurability. The adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) could be a feasible solution to meeting these challenges. Based on a comparison between the conceptual frameworks of SOAs versus modern standards for distributed automation, a methodology is proposed for the application of SOAs in the distributed automation domain. The implementation of the Service-Oriented Architecture based PLC execution environment is demonstrated on a case study.

The interoperability between various automation systems is considered as one of the major character of future automation systems. Service-oriented Architecture is a possible interoperability enabler between legacy and future automation systems. In order to prove the interoperability between those systems, a verification framework is essential. This paper proposes a configurable cloud-based validation environment for interoperability tests between various distributed automation systems. The testing framework is implemented in a multi-layer structure which provides automated closed-loop testing from the protocol level to the system level. The testing infrastructure is also capable for simulating automation systems as well as wireless sensor networks in the cloud. Test cases could be automatically generated and executed by the framework.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), initially developed for general purpose computing, is becoming increasingly popular in industrial automation, especially due to the growing importance of distributed measurement and control systems, Internet of Things and wireless sensor network infrastructures. There are two serious gaps in the current implementations of SOA for automation: the lack of a proper standard form for representing the logical relation between services at the system level, and, in particular, lack for a proper visual representation format enabling intuitive understanding and reconfiguration of services during the system lifecycle. In this paper, it is shown how these gaps can be filled using the IEC 61499 function block architecture in the most intuitive and natural way. The ideas are illustrated on example of systems, composed form intelligent mechatronic devices. Such features, as software reuse, flexibility, reconfigurability and scalability are demonstrated. The paper shows complementarity of the SOA and IEC 61499.

Web services are widely used for enterprise software development. Web service protocols simplify application integration thanks to interface description that can be processed at runtime and, in addition, due to mature and widely used standards for transportation and internetworking. Implementation of service-oriented architecture starts to get acceptance in the field of industrial automation ranging from international research project to the first implementations in industry including first commercial controller devices supporting web service communication protocols and executing deterministic control at the same time. The current research step is to allow knowledge-based integration of industrial automation systems and to exploit full potentials of run-time reconfiguration and adaptation of industrial systems. This paper demonstrates implementation of knowledge-based industrial system, the architecture and ontology model that can be generalized for implementation of other production systems.

Improving software development efficiency and reusability of existing programs is an important topic for industrial automation. Recently, modern software paradigms have been introduced into the automation domain such as object-oriented programming using the IEC 61131-3 standard and component-based design based on the IEC 61499 standard. In this paper, another software paradigm - service-oriented architecture is applied to the software design for automation programs. The proposed SOA pattern is based on a multi-layered structure with enhanced reusability and flexibility. A case study of water heating system is implemented to prove the concept of SOA paradigm.

This paper proposes a new methodology of migration from IEC 61131-3 PLCs to IEC 61499 function blocks. The aim of this migration process is to recreate IEC 61131-3 applications in IEC 61499 implementations with equivalent execution behavior. The formal model of the IEC 61131-3 standard for migration and cyclical execution model is defined. This method also creates a foundation for correct-by-design development tools and automatic migration between the IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499 standard. Formal migration rules based on ontology mappings, restoring execution model including tasks and programs scheduling and variables mapping with different access levels, are provided. A transformation engine for importing PLC code, mapping from PLC ontology model to function block model and code generation is implemented based on the ontological knowledge base and semantic query-enhanced web rule language. The migration approach is demonstrated on a simple airport baggage handling system.

Distributed control systems are widely deployed to all areas in industrial automation. However, a systematic approach to the design and programming of distributed automation and control systems is not clearly defined. This paper analyzes the differences between two control system architectures defined in IEC Standards — IEC 61131-3 for centralized control with programmable controllers (PLCs) vs. IEC 61499 for the use of function blocks (FBs) in distributed automation and control — in an attempt to identify the essential elements — the sine qua non — for such programming. Through this analysis, two indispensable elements — software modularity and the use of communication services — are identified. Guidelines are given for the use of these elements in both PLC and FB systems, and the application of these guidelines is illustrated in a case study of airport baggage handling systems.

This paper proposes a component-based design pattern for distributed automation programs. This design pattern aims to improve reusability of programs and reduce redevelopment time. Component-based design issues in both IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499 platforms are analyzed. Then the design pattern is proposed in a form of a set of rules. The pattern combines properties of service-oriented architecture (SOA) with multi-layered organization and engineering benefits of component organization. This design pattern is applied to both IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499 on example of a real airport baggage handling automation system. The result proves that the design pattern brings convenience for developers of automation programs and improves reusability of software components.

The IEC 61499 standard is designed for distributed control and proposes new visual form of programming using block diagrams with embedded state machines and unlimited hierarchical nesting and distribution across networking devices. Such visual programs require new methods of automatic syntactic and semantic analysis. This paper proposes a new approach to semantic analysis using multiple-layered ontological knowledge representation and rule-based inference engine. Its working is demonstrated on example.

A new methodology of transformation from IEC 61131-3 PLCs to IEC 61499 function blocks is proposed in this paper. The aim of this process is to recreate IEC 61131-3 programs in the IEC 61499 format automatically. The original PLC cyclical execution is fulfilled in the IEC 61499 function blocks. Definitions of IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499 ontology model are provided. Also the ontology mapping between those two standards is also achieved by using the SQWRL. A small airport baggage handling system implemented in the IEC 61131-3 PLC is converted to the IEC 61499 function block as a demonstration.

The IEC 61499 Function Block architecture is considered as the next generation of programmable control technology promoting distributed control in automation. In this paper, the redesign methodologies from the PLC control to the event-driven architecture of IEC 61499 function blocks are proposed. A general set of translation steps and mapping rules for redesigning applications from IEC 61131-3 PLC to IEC 61499 Function Blocks is provided. Three different redesign approaches are proposed: object-oriented conversion approach, object-oriented reuse approach, and class-oriented approach. These approaches are to be applied for different design styles of the source PLC code. The data handling efficiency of all approaches is investigated. An airport baggage handling system is chosen as the case study for the redesign process. The rules and limitations are summarized and guidelines for the redesign process are provided.

In this paper we discuss the problem of migration from the PLC control to the event-driven and component based architecture of IEC 61499 function blocks. We are using a conveyor system to illustrate three different migration methods: object-oriented in basic function block, object-oriented in composite function block and class-oriented in basic function block. The advantages and limitations are summarized and guideline for migration is provided.

The IEC 61499 architecture is a new standard proposed to replace current PLC technologies. This paper aims to develop a guide to migrate from IEC 61131 PLC technologies to IEC 61499 function blocks, especially for PLC programmers. Multiple PLC platforms are chosen as examples and transformed function block system is provided. Beyond migration rules, current limitation and cautions during migration are discussed on the final section of this paper.