Response Time for IEC 61499 over Ethernet

The IEC 61499 standard provides means to specify distributed control systems in terms of function blocks. For the deployment, each device may hold one or many logical resources, each consisting of a function block network with service interface blocks at the edges. The execution model is event driven (asynchronous), where triggering events may be associated with data (and seen as a message). In this paper we propose a low complexity implementation technique allowing to asses end-to-end response time of event chains spanning a networked devices. Based on a translation of IEC 61499 to RTFM-tasks and resources, the response time for each task in the system can be derived using established scheduling techniques. In this paper we develop a method to provide safe end-to-end response time taking both intra- and inter-device delivery delays into account. As a use case we study the implementation onto (single-core) ARMcortex based devices communicating over a switched Ethernet network. For the analysis we define a generic switch model, and an experimental setup allowing us to study the impact of network topology as well as 802.1Q quality of service in a mixed critical setting. Our results indicate that safe sub milli-second end-to-end response times can be obtained using the proposed approach.<p>Validerad; 2016; Nivå 1; 20150917 (maalin)