FBBeam: An Erlang-based IEC 61499 Implementation

The IEC 61499 is a modeling language for distributed control systems. Despite numerous research results existing on this topic, industry acceptance is lacking. This paper aims to investigate the benefits of reusing an existing soft real-time runtime system for the implementation of the IEC 61499. For this purpose, FBBeam, a compiler that automatically converts IEC 61499 models to Erlang source code, was implemented. Possible execution semantics are presented and compared to the Erlang execution model. An initial case study examines the scalability of a multi-tasking runtime environment. The results indicate that Erlang is able to utilize multiple CPU cores efficiently and can distribute the load dynamically. FBBeam represents an opportunity to reutilize an existing runtime environment for research on dynamic updating, distribution, monitoring, maintenance, and fault-tolerance for Industry 4.0 or Cyber Physical Production Systems.