Integration of IEC 61499 with OPC UA

From the industrial point of view, the beginning of the 21th century is predominated by fast-changing demands of the global market. This phenomenon is referred to as a shift from mass production to mass customization and brings new challenges into the manufacturing domain. The physical changes in the production resources mean a need for dynamic reconfiguration at the control level. In order to achieve true reconfigurable of manufacturing systems, new software architectures and supportive tools are needed. The aim of this process is to transform industrial control systems from the standard automation pyramid structure into a reconfigurable system. 4DIAC, framework created according to the IEC 61499, allows developers to create flexible industrial control applications using functional encapsulation in function blocks (FBs) and event-driven execution of the control code. This paper extends the flexibility of IEC 61499 application using OPC UA communication protocol that enables robust, reliable and save communication over various industrial systems. The proposed solution automatically creates the address space (a concept provide by OPC UA) according to the structure of an IEC 61499 application.