An object-oriented Integrated Development Environment (IDE), fully compliant with the new evolution of the IEC 61499, where developers of single CPS and/or of the orchestrating intelligence governing the behaviour of their aggregation will be capable of designing complex applications with ease, exploiting the abstraction layers and programming methodologies that the standard automation language proposes. Among others, the IDE will allow: conception of complex functional architectures; integration on (potentially reconfigurable) hardware topologies; deployment of the CPS intelligence on compliant controllers (see next point); design of all the composing elements of the IEC 61499 CPS model; exporting of fully functional applications to other IDEs through interoperable XML files.
Together with the IDE, the exploitable result will contain an evolved IEC 61499 Distributed Runtime, independent in its functionalities from the control hardware hosting it, that is capable of executing in real-time the on-board intelligence of the CPS developed and compiled through the IDE, while guaranteeing strict synchronization with the automation tasks executed by the other CPS of the orchestrated network. T
he IEC 61499-based runtime will manage, transparently to the developer, fundamental functionalities such as:
- event-based communication between separate controllers
- strict real-time clock synchronization among the IEC 61499 network
- near-real-time bidirectional connectivity to the in-Cloud behavioural models of the CPS
- Not specified