IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation

Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0

by John Conway

Executive summary
The benefits of Industry 4.0 and IIoT use
cases for industry are well documented.
But, failure to adopt digital age industrial
automation standards that are truly open is
costly on all fronts: unnecessary expense,
delays in rolling out innovative manufacturing
plant designs, and lost business opportunity.

The IEC 61499 standard sets a foundation for

industrial automation application portability
that creates wide-ranging benefits,
including easy IT/OT system convergence,
improved return-on-investment on software
applications that can run independent of any
hardware platform, and engineering design
efficiency that radically speeds up new
product time-to-market.
 Schneider Electric White Paper 2

Introduction Global economic and market uncertainties are forcing manufacturers to rapidly adjust
to more frequent, high-speed changes in demand and in raw material and energy
pricing. Such trends are prompting process manufacturers to rethink the way industrial
automation systems need to work. Part of that reassessment involves an increasing need to
accommodate increased product variants and shorter sourcing, production, and product
delivery lifecycles.

Industrial organizations and their stakeholders also face the challenge of accommodating
significant workforce changes as Baby Boomers retire and take their industrial automation
systems knowledge with them. The new, Digital Native generation of employees coming in
expect that knowledge will be embedded in the systems they will be required to work with.

Many industrial stakeholders are hoping that Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of
Things (IIoT) will help to address these new challenges. Early benefits of Industry 4.0 have
been well documented—artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that greatly
improve the quality of operational processes, the prediction of equipment failures before
they happen to reduce unplanned downtime, real-time optimization of production based on
raw-material spot prices, and real-time optimization of production scheduling to maximize
throughput. In fact, industry analysts estimate that the new, more flexible production
techniques could boost manufacturer productivity by as much as 30%.1 However, research
has also shown that 60% of enterprises fail to take IIoT projects beyond the pilot stage.2

Figure 1
Operating from an open, as Augmented/
Data Cloud/Edge Virtual
opposed to a proprietary Analytics Computing Reality
industrial automation Industry 4.0
framework, suddenly
Wireless/5G Artificial
renders accessible the Intelligence
entire new range of
Industry 4.0 benefits Sensors/ Open
Internet of Automation Autonomous
Things Framework Machines

The reasons for this are numerous and linked to people, processes and technology. With
regards to technology, the biggest factor that keeps most mainstream manufacturers from
attaining such benefits is the closed proprietary nature of the plant systems that support
their operations. Operating from a truly open, as opposed to a proprietary industrial
automation framework, suddenly renders accessible the entire new range of Industry 4.0
benefits.

This paper proposes an approach, based on the IEC 61499 standard, that not only
addresses the shortcomings of proprietary systems, but also facilitates the convergence of
operation technology (OT) and information technology (IT) systems.

1
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-industrial-smart-production
2
Capgemini “Unlocking the Business Value of IoT in Operations” March 13th 2018

IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0 Benefits
 Schneider Electric White Paper 3

Barriers to For manufacturers to move forward into the new world of open industrial automation
systems, engineering teams need to be cognizant of the barriers that need to be
Overcome overcome:

● Non-digital architecture – Most of today’s automation systems are based on

principles developed in the 1970s and 80s. Highly optimized for real-time control,
the technology has not taken advantage of the recent and rapid changes in IT. It
is precisely these technologies (analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning,
object orientation, service-oriented architectures, etc.) that are required to realize
the promise of Industry 4.0.
● Hardware-centric business model – Although advancement in hardware can serve
to optimize an existing environment, it will not lead to the breakthroughs required to
enable the true benefits of the digital transformation. This will require the intelligent
application of software-based innovation to OT problems. This will result in a steady
shift from hardware-driven to software-driven business value.

IT
Figure 2
Proprietary automation
cannot leverage advances
in IT technologies and
lack of application
code portability hinders
innovation and investment
SW SW SW SW
in software
HW HW HW HW
Vendor 1 Vendor 2 Vendor 3 Vendor 4

● Constraints of proprietary systems – Today, automation software applications

written for one system will not run on another system. In the IT world, standardized
operating systems such as Linux have, for decades, encouraged the rapid
expansion of an active third-party application development ecosystem. As a result,
software of all kinds support IT-related business needs across a wide swath of
industries and niches. Unfortunately, in the industrial world, proprietary systems
act as a barrier to innovation: Users are unable to improve their production systems
at reasonable cost and are unable to mix and match best-of-breed offers from
different suppliers. Their rate of innovation is “imposed” by the suppliers of the
proprietary platform they use.

Together, these barriers increase total cost of ownership. And since upstream design
tools and downstream operations tools cannot be closely coupled with automation
systems without a huge investment, the creation of an efficient digital thread covering the
full process/machine lifecycle is next to impossible.

IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0 Benefits
 Schneider Electric White Paper 4

Why the time On the engineering side of the equation, value chain members such as machine builders
and systems integrators also face their own set of limitations working within the constraint
is ripe to move of the current industrial automation infrastructure paradigm.

to an open Machine builders are facing new challenges. On the one hand, there is a trend towards
automation modular machine design using virtual testing capabilities to mix the virtual and physical
worlds. On the other hand, increasing the added value of their machines requires
framework services and innovative business models to help differentiate themselves and to help
market and grow their business. The current automation construct does not favor their
ability to expand into software and services offerings.

For systems integrators, automation systems do not provide the tools to bridge the IT
and OT worlds. As a result, they find themselves having to craft solutions that are overly
complex and labor-intensive thereby limiting the widespread marketplace acceptance of
such services.

On the End User side, organizations such as the Open Process Automation Forum
(OPAF), and the User Association of Automation Technology in Process Industries
(NAMUR) are advocating for changes to the existing proprietary automation systems
paradigm.

For all of these reasons, the time is ripe to move to an open automation framework.
The key that unlocks this new world is the emerging IEC 61499 standard. Technological
evolution has finally caught up enough to allow the standard to exercise its full potential.
That is, IEC 61499 can now serve as an essential building block for the development of
a truly open industrial automation environment where software applications are portable
across multi-vendor hardware platforms.

What characteristics of the IEC 61499 standard make it well-suited for exploiting the
benefits of Industry 4.0 digitization and for creating a foundation for truly open systems?
Table 1 summarizes the key aspects.

IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0 Benefits
 Schneider Electric White Paper 5

Desired
Characteristics IEC 61499 Support
Object-orientation The event driven function block structure of IEC 61499 with processing of
data inputs, outputs and local internal variables closely matches the IT notion
of objects, methods and parameters. This strong encapsulation is a key
characteristic of software components.
Nesting of objects The unlimited nesting of networks of function blocks within composite function
blocks allows the user to build up complex objects based on simpler proven-
in-use software components. This is a key driver of quality and engineering
efficiency.
Black-box software IEC 61499 does not define the programming language used inside function
components blocks. The function block can be considered as a “wrapper” in which a
developer can encapsulate his IP. If desired, the developer can protect his IP
and deliver a black-box software component that can then be used within an
application.

This black-box approach is a key enabler of an app-store business model for

automation.
Graphical design The event-driven function block is a graphical design language very familiar to
language automation engineers.

The standard also defines “adapters” that serve to hide the spaghetti of
multiple event/data connections between different composite function blocks.
The adapter defines interfaces in the form of plugs and sockets. In this way,
complex composite function blocks can be linked together using “single line
Table 1 engineering”. Plugs will only connect to the corresponding socket if they are
compatible.
Highlights some of the
key characteristics of the This encourages a graphical model-based or “low-code” design approach
standard and describes the allowing non-automation specialists to plug together black-box software
components to form complex automation applications.
relationship of the standard
to the new digital IT/OT Hardware The IEC 61499 standard enables application-centric design by separating the
convergence world that is abstraction application model from the system model. Application programming is performed
independently of the underlying control devices/resources and communications
beginning to emerge. infrastructure topology which is defined by the system model.

This separation of the application from the underlying hardware is one of the
enablers of portable software applications across multi-vendor hardware
platforms.
Architectural The standard lends itself to both distributed and centralized architectures. The
flexibility system model maps/distributes one or more applications by defining which parts
of the applications are executed on which particular devices/resources.

A device/resource model manages the connection to the process interface

(sensors/actuators via the device IO bus) and the communication interface to
other devices used by the distributed application.

The combination of application, system and device/resource models

enables applications to be designed independently of the underlying
automation hardware, to be distributed across heterogeneous devices with
zero programming effort, and for those devices to interoperate following
standardized communications/data models across networks (again without
additional programming).

Distributing the application across multiple devices or centralizing it on a

powerful edge controller becomes in effect a customer choice.
Realtime The event-driven nature of IEC 61499 is a natural fit for interfacing to
and anytime transactional IT systems. Now developers can combine real-time OT functions
performance and “right-time” IT functions in one application, for example, a pump control
block that can initiate the creation of a maintenance work order based on built-
in predictive analytics.

IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0 Benefits
 Schneider Electric White Paper 6

To summarize, IEC 61499 defines a high-level system design language for distributed
information and control systems. The standard allows encapsulation of functionality,
graphical component-based design, event-driven execution and distribution of
automation applications for execution across a broad range of automation & control
devices, as well as edge computing devices.

With the emergence of the IEC 61499 standard and the interest of key automation vendors
such as Schneider Electric to adopt open automation systems platforms, many of the
ingredients are in place to help reshape the industrial automation systems playing field.

Early Schneider Electric field tests of tools based on the IEC 61499 standard suggest
that engineering gains of three to four times can be achieved compared to conventional
programming approaches.

More than Plug and Produce Systems

The move to automation systems based on IEC 61499 is more than a simple technology
a simple change. It has the potential to fundamentally change the way processes and machines
technology are designed.

change The technical features described above will drive portability & interoperability of
application software across multi-vendor platforms and will enable an app-store
model for industrial automation.

App Store Model

Proven Automation Apps

Segment- IT Services Mechatronic

specific Digital Twin Components • Single line engineering

Multi-Vendor Portability
Figure 3
Plug and Produce
Today Tomorrow
Low Value Proprietary Applications High Value Portable Apps

Costs Costs

Time to Market Time to Market

Flexibility Flexibility

Quality Quality

IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0 Benefits
 Schneider Electric White Paper 7

This will drive a long-term shift from low-value programming of proprietary controllers to
plug & produce automation systems using proven-in-use automation apps developed
by a broad Ecosystem. Applications will run on a broad range of multi-vendor devices
ranging from embedded SoCs to powerful edge computers.

The reduction in engineering costs and the simplification of the implementation of

complex Industry 4.0 use cases, will unleash a step-change in productivity, flexibility and
speed for industry.

About the author

John Conway has worked over 30 years in the automation industry in a variety of technical & commercial
roles. His current mission is to drive the adoption of an open, software-centric automation platform that
can address the needs of Industry 4.0. John has a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Manchester
University UK and a Diplome d’Ingenieur in the Design of Machine Systems from the Technology
University of Compiegne, France.

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IEC 61499: The Industrial Automation Standard for Portability that

Unleashes Industry 4.0 Benefits