Concurrent Execution Semantics for IEC 61499 Based Industrial Edge Applications

Industrial internet and edge computing brings lots of new opportunities for traditional industrial automation systems. With massive computing, storage, and communication resources available on field devices, a single device can handle multiple tasks simultaneously. Real-time and non-real-time industrial applications can operate on the same edge device easily. The IEC 61499 is proposed to be used as the system-level modeling language for industrial edge applications. To support the concurrent execution of function block networks, the semantics are given in this paper. The event splitting and merging rules are investigated to ensure the determinism of parallel executions. Finally, the concurrent execution semantics are implemented in the IEC 61499 runtime environment and performance is analyzed.