Implementing constrained cyber-physical systems with IEC 61499

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are integrations of computation and control with sensing and actuation of the physical environment. Typically, such systems consist of embedded computers that monitor and control physical processes in a feedback loop. While modern electronic systems are increasingly characterized as CPS, their design and synthesis still rely on traditional methods, which lack systematic and automated techniques for accomplishment.

Recently, IEC 61499 has been proposed as a standard for designing industrial process-control and measurement systems. It prescribes a component-based approach for developing industrial automation software using function blocks. Executable code can then be automatically generated and simulated from these function blocks. This bodes well for designers of CPS, who are more likely to be experts in specific industrial domains, rather than in computer science. The intuitive graphical nature and automatic code synthesis of IEC 61499 programs will alleviate the programming burden of industrial engineers, while ensuring more reliable software. While software synthesis from IEC 61499 programs is not new, the generation of efficient code from them has been wanting. This has made it difficult for function blocks to be used in software development for resource-constrained embedded controllers commonly employed in CPS. To address this, we present an approach that can generate very efficient code from function block descriptions. Experimental results from a benchmark suite shows that our approach produces substantially faster and smaller code compared to existing techniques.