Using Design Space Exploration to Calculate Deployment Configurations of IEC 61499-based Systems

Continuous digitalization in the industry leads to new, highly complex systems that increase configuration costs. In particular, software and hardware changes cause major downtime. To dynamically reconfigure control system and avoid downtime, it is necessary to calculate valid or optimal deployment configurations. Previous research applies Design Space Exploration (DSE) techniques embedded into model-based design methodologies to calculate deployment configurations. However, current research either aims domains other than industrial automation or applies simple and, for real-life problems, not applicable constraints and objectives. Thus, the deployment of software components to hardware components is still an exhausting and manual task. In this work, we take first steps towards an automatically optimized deployment of the industrial automation systems. In particular, we propose applying DSE to calculate deployment configurations of IEC 61499-based control applications. In order to reduce the exploration space, we identify domain-specific constraints and objectives. Furthermore, we extend the IEC 61499 System and Application models' descriptions by proposing relevant hardware and software annotations. We exhibit the applicability of the identified annotations, constraints and objectives on the example of an Industry 4.0 relevant case study.