IEC 61499 Compliant Remote Web-Based IDE for Function Block Design

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS) place increasing demands on the software tools used to design and operate distributed industrial control applications. The IEC 61499 standard provides a structured and event-driven function block model well suited to these environments, yet existing development tools remain predominantly desktop-based and poorly adapted to collaborative or remote workflows. This dissertation investigates whether modern web technologies can meaningfully address these limitations and proposes PTERO, a remote web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the modelling, deployment and monitoring of IEC 61499-compliant applications. The developed architecture shifts heavy orchestration workloads from local workstations to a centralized middleware server. To resolve the collaborative friction inherent to traditional file-based workflows, the platform incorporates a collaboration layer driven by Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT), facilitating concurrent multi-user visual modelling. The system was validated through performance benchmarks against 4DIAC-IDE. The evaluation demonstrated that PTERO substantially reduced configuration overhead and improved the collaboration capabilities of the system. Furthermore, a usability study confirmed the participants' perception of these improvements. Ultimately, this research proves that migrating to a web-based engineering paradigm successfully modernizes distributed industrial automation.