IEC 61499 Skill-based Distributed Design Pattern

Cyber-physical production systems (CPPSs) are modern production systems that aim to integrate the latest techniques and technologies from IT to enable flexible/adaptive manufacturing. The IEC 61499 standardizes a domain-specific modeling language used for developing control software for distributed CPPSs. However, currently, IEC 61499 software misses concrete design guidelines, and those that exist are often not concrete enough to implement high-quality software, which makes changeability and refactoring error-prone and tedious. Furthermore, modularization and decoupling of hardware access and software functions are missing concrete design patterns. This paper aims to implement and test the concepts of skill-based design patterns for IEC 61499 for a concrete use case in a simulation. We employ a case study to demonstrate the approach’s feasibility, achieve the benefits of modularity, adaptability, and maintainability, and facilitate better error handling.