Analyzing the compatibility between ISA 88 and IEC 61499

Abstract

In the last years many standards have been created for the industrial control domain. Some have found wide adoption in the industry, while others seem to never leave the stage of a promising technology. An example of the first type is ISA 88, that defines an architectural design for control applications for the batch process industry. The author is of the opinion that IEC 61499 is an example of the latter. In this paper the author analyzes how the design architecture defined in ISA 88 may be implemented using the programming framework defined in IEC 61499. Even though ISA 88 and IEC 61499 both follow an event based and object-oriented approach, the author uncovers a fundamental constraint of the IEC 61499 related to the dynamic invocation of services from distinct object instances. Without trying to extend the IEC 61499 standard, two approaches are presented to work around this constraint.