The IEC 61499 standard has existed since 2005, so why has it still not been able to establish itself in automation technology?

The author: Gregory Boucaud is Chief Marketing Officer at UniversalAutomation.Org.

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Gregory Boucaud: First of all, it is simply the case that the previous way of automating has worked very well. The PLC in particular is still so popular in the industry as an extremely reliable component for good reason. For many years, neither end users nor machine manufacturers were under any particular pressure to change anything. In addition, a system architecture with distributed intelligence naturally also requires corresponding computing power in the automation components. A high bandwidth is also required for data communication. As both of these have only been available across the board for a few years, the cost of investing in IEC61499-based solutions has hardly been worthwhile in the past. Industry-compatible implementations and therefore also convincing proofs of feasibility were therefore still in short supply at the beginning.

What gives you the confidence that IEC 61499 will now take off after all?

Boucaud: The industrial world has changed rapidly in recent years. Perhaps even faster than ever before. Of course, this is due to digitalization, but also to the crises that we have recently experienced and are still experiencing. For many industries, such as the food industry, the competitive environment has changed dramatically. Volatile demand, individual customer requirements, a shortage of skilled workers and supply chain problems are placing ever greater demands on the level of automation. If you want to produce even the smallest batch sizes profitably, you simply need versatile systems with short changeover times. And an automation approach based on IEC61499 with its event orientation and distributed intelligence is simply ideal for this. And of course there are also enormous advantages in terms of engineering with reusable software objects. In this respect, it is a logical development for me that automation and the IT world are continuing to converge in this sense. I am also particularly confident because the response from users and machine manufacturers has been very positive. UniversalAutomation.Org is growing continuously.

With the strong influence of IT and the associated introduction of new software technologies into automation, high-level languages are also increasingly moving into automation. Where can IEC 61499 find its place?

Boucaud: IEC 61499 is actually the ideal link between the two worlds. In other words, between the IT world and automation. This is because it takes into account the requirements and priorities of a PLC programmer as well as the requirements of a high-level language programmer. IT applications, for example for data analysis or artificial intelligence, can be easily integrated natively into my automated application in the form of an encapsulated function block. This integration of high-level languages is not so easy with classic PLC-based automation. The merging of IT and OT is also simplified in IEC61499 by the event-based execution logic.

Where does UniversalAutomation.Org stand today and where do you see it in five years' time?

Boucaud : As of today, we have 34 members. And the signs are pointing to growth. The IT company Kyndryl and the hardware manufacturer ASRock have just joined. We are very pleased about that. But as our aim is to spread a manufacturer-independent automation approach across the board, we are constantly working on finding more members. Of course, anyone who joins UniversalAutomation.Org today is clearly an early adopter. However, we expect that in five years' time, this head start will have paid off. Not only for users and system builders, but also for manufacturers.