New technologies and standards are emerging which will have a dramatic effect on the design and implementation of future industrial control systems. PLCs and PC-based soft controllers are beginning to use software components, for example function blocks, to business systems. New tools and techniques are needed to design and model these systems, such as UML and modern fieldbus technology. The IEC 61499 standard has been developed specifically to model distributed control systems. Practical tools based on IEC 61499 are likely to emerge soon to model, validate and simulate the behaviour of complex networks of function blocks and it is expected that this standard will become key to highly-developed distributed systems.

'In the book, the use of the technique is illustrated in two fairly simple industrial applications. Their simplicity should not obscure the potential value of this injection of the latest developments in computer software writing into control engineering, and the value of this little book in delineating it.'
-- Robotica

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: IEC 61499 models and concepts
• Chapter 3: Defining function block and subapplication types
• Chapter 4: Service Interface function blocks
• Chapter 5: Event function blocks
• Chapter 6: Industrial application examples
• Chapter 7: Future development
• Appendices