Software Containers as a Generic Foundation for IEC 61499 Distributed Control Systems

It is predicated that in the future factories will be more dependent upon complex distributed control software, where execution and communication occur at the edge of the system, close to the machines that are involved in the manufacturing process. This introduces the problem of how to effectively design, deploy and manage such systems. The IEC 61499 function block standard has been given as one way to solve this problem, proposing applications made from a number of modular event driven blocks that encapsulate algorithms potentially in any programming language. At the same time the Internet of Things and Cloud computing fields have encountered the similar problem of encapsulating, managing and distributing scalable applications, and have been investigating software containers as a solution. This paper proposes to combine these two approaches using containers to enable easy distribution and management of software modules on manufacturing devices while taking advantage of the IEC 61499 application model to enable an application orchestration tool. It describes the properties of container technology that can support the creation of function block like components and the proposal is supported by a prototype version of such a system which has already been implemented.