Industrial Communication Systems

55-1

55.1 Introduction

e IEC 61499 standard [1] denes a system architecture for industrial measurement and control

systems based on the concept of function block (FB). A FB is a soware unit (or, more generally, an

intellectual property

cap

sule)

tha

t

enc

apsulates

som

e

beh

avior

and fac

ilitates

its re-

use.

e

International

Electrotechnical

Commission

(IEC)

initiated

the

IEC

61499

project

to

address

the

limitations

of

the

legacy

PLC*

programming

languages

looking

toward

the

realities

of

implementing

real-time

multiagent

systems.

Unlike

previous

standardization

eorts,

this

is

not

a

retrospective

recog-

nition

of

practices,

but

an

attempt

to

g