In the paper by W. Dai et al. [2015], a formal mapping between IEC 61499 and service-oriented architecture (SOA) is presented, and an SOA-based execution environment architecture is described. In this comment, we discuss the mapping and the execution environment architecture, as well as the suggested potentials for exploiting those. We present specific arguments and make cases that call the authors' claims into question.

The System Modeling Language (SysML) has been defined as a general-purpose modeling language to unify the various modeling languages currently used for systems engineering applications. In this paper, industrial motivations for making a technology upgrade to SysML are explored. Nuclear power plant automation modernization projects are identified as potential early adopters of SysML. This paper reports on a SysML evaluation done in one such modernization project that is currently in the pre-study phase. As SysML could be used even to describe an entire nuclear power plant at a detailed level, this study aims to identify the scope at which SysML could be practically and beneficially applied. The paper identifies further technological developments that could increase industrial motivation to upgrade to SysML.

The IEC 61499 function block model was proposed as an extension of the widely accepted IEC 61131 function block diagram to address new challenges in the development of industrial automation software systems. Event driven execution is promoted as being one of the key features of this standard to achieve flexibility, interoperability and support for distribution. In this paper, it is claimed that 61499 fails in defining a coherent event handling model. Publications in the domain have also failed in addressing this problem adopting misperceptions and contradictions regarding the event driven nature of IEC 61499. These misperceptions and contradictions are discussed and an attempt is made to bring some light into this area so as to better exploit both 61131 and 61499.

The IEC 61131 has been successfully used for many years in the industrial automation domain. IEC 61499 was defined to better handle complexity and increase modularity and reusability in the development process, but it failed on its objective. The extension of the IEC 61131 that supports the Object Oriented paradigm is considered today as the most promising solution to address new requirements and lead to a more productive development process. In this paper, the upcoming version of the IEC 61131 and mainly its extension to the OO paradigm is analyzed with the intention to identify defects and propose solutions. The approach adopted in this extension is quite similar to the one of C++, i.e., a mixing of procedural and OO paradigms. This has advantages and dis-advantages for the developer.

The IEC 61131 standard has accepted high criticism last years regarding its compliance with state of the art software engineering practices and concepts. A new version of the standard with main focus on an Object Oriented (OO) extension is under development. In this paper, a different point of view of the IEC 61131 is presented. It is claimed that 61131 already supports basic concepts of the OO programming paradigm and it has already introduced in the industrial automation domain the Model Driven development paradigm that is widely accepted in software and system engineering. Extensions are proposed to improve the standard's support to the model driven development paradigm and mainly the platform independent modeling.

Model Driven Development (MDD) has been proved as a quite successful paradigm in general-purpose computing and is currently exploited in the embedded systems domain. On the other hand, the majority of industrial automation systems is developed based on the IEC 61131 standard. This standard defines a model and a set of programming languages for the development of industrial automation software and it is supported by the majority of the commercial tools in this domain. This work proposes an MDD process to increase the productivity and reliability of the development process of industrial automation systems. Piping and instrumentation diagrams are considered as source of requirements for process control engineering and SysML is used to reduce the gap between these diagrams and the 61131 based design specs of the control system. The foundation for a SysML profile to facilitate the exploitation of SysML in this domain is described. This profile will allow the developer to work in higher layers of abstraction than the one supported by IEC 61131 and effectively move from requirement specifications into the implementation model of the system.

System safety is the property of the system that characterizes its ability to prevent from hazards, which may lead to accidents or losses. Traditionally, system developers are not familiar with system safety analysis processes which are performed by safety engineers. One reason for this is the gap that exists between the traditional development processes, methodologies, notations and tools and the ones used in safety engineering. This gap makes the development of safety aware systems a very complicated task. Several approaches based on UML have been proposed to address this gap. In this paper, an approach to integrate safety engineering with a SysML based development process that is expressed in the form of the V-model, is presented. Preliminary hazard analysis is adopted and applied to a SysML based requirements specification of the mechatronic system that exploits essential use cases. A case study from the railway domain is used to illustrate the proposed approach.

There is a need to replace existing mechanical and electromechanical systems with new ones, where functionality will be mainly implemented by software. The traditional approaches in the development of this kind of systems, which are known as mechatronic systems (MTSs), prove wholly inappropriate for todaypsilas problems that are characterized by complexity, dynamics and uncertainty. In this paper, challenges in the development of MTSs are discussed and the mechatronic component is proposed as the key construct to address these challenges. The means that the construct of mechatronic component addresses the challenges of synergistic integration, size and complexity and reuse are discussed and the infrastructure for a prototype implementation is described.

The IEC 61499 standard has been recently adopted to promote a more flexible development process in the control and automation domain. The standard mainly deals with modeling issues leaving a lot of model execution details open. Different research groups are already working for the development of execution environments for the defined component model, proposing implementations with different execution semantics. This paper discuss the semantics of the execution environment and presents two execution environments, which although independently developed share a similar view of IEC61499 execution semantics and are both implemented over RTAI (real time application interface), a real-time Linux-based platform.

The successful use of IEC 61499 in the industry requires software development processes that utilize the standard's support for best practices of software engineering, such as CORFU. The adoption of such a process would involve upgrading existing practices, tacit knowledge and legacy software, which constitute much of the core competence and essential assets of a company. This paper reports on a two part research that aims to manage the risk and cost of such a venture. The first part has been performed in collaboration with professionals in order to identify industrially familiar work practices for IEC 61499 based development. The second part investigates the possibility of adapting the CORFU development process into the direction of the work practices discovered in the first part.

Currently available tools for the development of the next generation distributed control and automation systems, adopt traditional architectural styles and do not cover the whole requirements of the development process. One of the major drawbacks of traditional engineering support systems (ESSs), which is extensibility, can be addressed by providing a public domain framework that can be easily extended. In this paper, a service-oriented architectural framework is adopted to provide the infrastructure for the exploitation of service-oriented computing in the development process of factory automation systems. Features required in the development process are implemented as Web-services and published in the public domain, so as to be used on demand by control engineers to construct their projects' specific ESSs. The infrastructure required to build a Web-service based ESS is presented. Specific Web-services are presented and the way that these services affect the development process is discussed. The need of a common field device model in the context of this approach is discussed and an ontology-based framework for such a device model is defined.

Methodologies, techniques and tools that currently support the embedded systems (ESs) development process prove inadequate for today's complex ESs. Adopted traditional architectural styles do not cover the whole requirements of the development process, with extensibility being the major drawback. Service-oriented computing is exploited in this paper, to define an architectural framework for a demand-led ESs development process. Features required in the development process are defined as Web-services, published in the public domain, and used on demand through semantic Web by developers to construct their projects' specific integrated development environment (IDE). The way that these services affect the development process is discussed with main focus on an ontology-based device modeling.

The International Electro-technical Commission through the 61499 standard establishes the basic infrastructure towards an open market in the control and automation domain. This standard can be considered as the first step towards the development of the next generation agile manufacturing systems where distribution, interoperability and re-configuration are between the most important requirements. However, even though many researchers are working during last years towards this direction, the understanding of the use of the IEC 61499 between practitioners is weak. The standard has many open issues regarding the design views that are required for an effective design process for distributed control systems. In this paper, the inefficiencies of IEC 61499, at least as far as the design phase is considered, are highlighted and the way that these inefficiencies can be addressed is discussed. A laboratory system, the FESTO modular production system, is used as a running example to demonstrate possible design alternatives.

The IEC 61499 standard introduces the function block (FB) model to support the development of open, interoperable, distributed control applications (DCAs). Currently available engineering support systems (ESSs) as well as those under development adopt traditional architectural styles and do not cover the whole requirements of the development process of FB-based DCAs. However, the major drawback of traditional ESSs is that of extensibility. This problem can be addressed by providing a public domain framework that can be easily extended. In this paper an approach that promotes the idea of service-oriented computing in the control and automation domain, is described. A service-oriented architectural framework is proposed to provide the infrastructure for the exploitation of service-oriented computing in the development process of factory automation systems. Features required in the development process will be implemented as services and published in the public domain. These services can be used on demand by control engineers to construct their projects' specific engineering support environments.

The IEC61499 standard is the first step towards the development of the next generation agile manufacturing systems where distribution, interoperability and re-configuration are between the most important requirements. Development environments that will demonstrate the applicability of this standard in industrial environments are still missing. In this paper an approach that allows the execution of IEC61499 based control applications on an industrial field device is presented. This approach allows the control engineer to design the control application in terms of function block network diagrams, and subsequently exploit the model-driven development paradigm to run the control application on a single-chip real-time Java microcontroller especially designed for real-time embedded applications.

In this paper an approach for the transparent use of real-time Java in control and automation is described. The proposed approach, which is in the context of the model integrated mechatronics paradigm, exploits the function block (FB) construct for the design model and the real-time Java specification for the implementation one. Specific interpreters allow for the automatic generation of FB types' implementation models in terms of real-time Java and the transformation of the application's FB networks to deployment specifications that are next utilized by a launcher to initialize and execute the control application on the proposed execution environment. The proposed approach favours deployment and re-deployment of distributed control applications and exploits the real-time specification for Java to meet their stringent nonfunctional requirements.

The traditional approach for the development of manufacturing systems considers the constituent parts of the system, i.e., mechanical, electronic, and software, to be developed independently and then integrated to form the final system. This approach is being criticized as inappropriate for the complexity and the dynamics of today's systems. This paper proposes an architecture that promotes model integration not only for implementation space artifacts but also in artifacts of the early analysis and design phases of the development process. The proposed architecture, which promotes reuse and significantly decreases development and validation time, is at the heart of a new paradigm called model-integrated mechatronics (MIM). MIM applies domain-specific modeling languages for the concurrent engineering of mechanical, electronic and software components of mechatronic systems. It simplifies the integrated development process of manufacturing systems by using as basic construct the mechatronic component. The MIM paradigm was utilized to define "Archimedes," a system platform that supports the engineer through a methodology, a framework, and a set of tools to automate the development process of agile mechatronic manufacturing systems.

The function block (FB) has been defined by the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) as the basic construct for the development of reusable, interoperable, distributed control applications. Complete applications can be defined in the design level as networks of interconnected FBs. For these design models to be automatically converted to implementation ones, adopting the model integrated computing paradigm, an appropriate implementation meta-model should be defined We describe two alternatives for the implementation of FB design models. The first one adopts the straightforward transformation of the FB design model to a high level language (C+ +, Java) implementation model. The second approach utilizes UML-RT models as an intermediate representation towards the final implementation model. Both approaches support the dynamic re-configuration of the control application and exploit our extensions to the IEC execution control chart notation, to improve the expressiveness of the design model and the efficiency of the implementation one

The function block (FB) concept, which is used in the field of control applications for years, is now enhanced by the evolving IEC 61499 standard to support the development of modular, re-usable, open, and vendor-independent distributed control applications. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) on the other hand is the industry standard for modeling software systems. This paper presents an approach that integrates the FB concept with the UML notation in order to simplify and strengthen the development process of distributed control applications. Use cases are used to capture the requirements of the specific control application. UML models are next used to capture the static and dynamics of the system. A set of transformation rules enhances the transition from UML diagrams to FB design diagrams. CORFU, an IEC-compliant engineering tool, supports the whole process.

The IEC model for distributed control systems (DCSs) was adopted for the implementation of a new generation engineering tool. However, it was found that this approach does not exploit all the benefits of the object and component technologies. In this paper, we present the enhanced 4-layer architecture that proved to be very helpful in the identification of the key abstractions required for the design of the new generation of function block based engineering tools. Despite being IEC-compliant, the proposed approach introduces a number of extensions and modifications to the IEC-model to improve the development process. The Unified Modelling Language is exploited during the requirements phase of DCSs, but the use of the FB construct is confected during the design phase.

The function block (FB) concept is proposed by evolving standards to address most of the problems encountered in the development process of distributed industrial process measurement and control systems (IPMCS) applications. To increase modularity, reliability and expandability of FB-based IPMCS applications as well as to automate the development process and increase reusability, new generation FB-oriented engineering support systems (ESS), are highly required. These ESSs should be able to exploit FBs provided by intelligent field devices, which are expected to appear in the market in the near future, and also assign functionality to the great number of different field devices that already exist in the market. A common field device model is strongly required to accomplish both the above tasks. In the context of this work, we consider the requirements for the field device model imposed both by the development of the FB-oriented ESSs and the demand for device interoperability during the fieldbus operation phase. We use the Unified Modelling Language (UML) to proceed to the definition of the field device model. This model, combined with our 4-layer IPMCS architecture, constitutes a framework that facilitates the development of open FB-oriented ESSs.