Simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems using IEC61499

IEC61499 is an emerging standard for the design of automation systems. While many compilers and associated tools for IEC61499 have been developed, systematic techniques for modelling the continuous dynamics of the physical processes are lacking. Current practices involve using co-simulation, where plants are modelled in a tool such as Simulink and controllers are designed using IEC61499. Co-simulation has many limitations such as slow sampling and free-wheeling. In this paper we propose a systematic approach for the design and simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) using IEC61499. We propose the concept of Hybrid Function Blocks (HFBs), as syntactic extensions, to specify the continuous dynamics of a physical plant. A Hybrid Function Block can be compiled into a standards compliant Basic Function Block, based on new deterministic synchronous semantics. To show that our approach is both scalable and efficient when designing CPS, we present benchmarks showing that it runs 29 % faster than Simulink when generating correlating traces.