Building Fault Tolerant Industrial Applications Based on IEC 61499

Abstract

IEC 61499 defines an execution model for industrial control applications that may be distributed among several devices. In such a heterogeneous environment partial failures are likely to occur. In order to avoid probable system malfunction and breakdowns, the authors propose a framework where the concept of replication may be applied to the IEC 61499 execution model. This framework takes special care in guaranteeing that all replicas maintainsynchronised internal state, and reduces network overload by using the timed-messages protocol. This paperpresents an example application of how the replication framework may be used in a real-world scenario.