News on IEC 61499 Technology from SPS/IPC/Drives, Nürnberg: IEC 61499 Booth
At the SPS/IPC/Drives automation fair, which is, probably, the largest automation related event in the world, the IEC 61499 is represented by its own booth, sponsored by the commercial vendors of this technology, such as ISaGRAF, NxtControl and Infoteam.The booth is organized and maintained by o3neida.
The most notable artefacts seen on the booth:
– Infoteam has presented an application of IEC 61499 for Smartgrid automation and control, that combines IEC 61850 communication with IEC 61499 design. It is based on ISaGRAF technology;
– The University of Auckland presented an interoperability demo, where NxtStudio, BlokIDE + BlokSynk and ISaGRAF devices were used in one distributed system.
– 4DIAC consortium presented the newest release of 4DIAC-IDE that is capable of remote debugging and monitoring of distributed systems thanks to the extended device management protocol;
– BlokTech presented BlokCAD: an automatic generator of IEC 61499 control programs for material handling systems based on the input in form of layout imported from CAD tools.
News from commercial vendors on their own booths
ISaGRAF:
Version 6.1 of ISaGRAF features a completely new powerful editor of IEC 61499 function blocks. Since version 6.0, ISaGRAF IDE is plug-in based, offering a lot of flexibility to OEMs and end-users.
NxtControl:
The next release of NxtStudio will feature a very interesting solution of combing IEC 61499 with IEC 61131-3. This will allow migrating existing IEC 61131-3 libraries into NxtStudio, using them in event-driven function block applications, or in the traditional cyclic scan manner of PLCs.
Advantech:
The ADAM-6600 series of IEC 61499 compliant devices was presented as “nano-control nodes for distributed systems”. It possibly constitutes just a first step in the company’s strategic move to this advanced software architecture. As seen from the photo below, the IEC 61499 plays the role of overarching architecture for the huge range of the company’s hardware.
More details to follow!