IEC 61499 Function Block Repository

A Distributed Repository of IEC 61499 Function Block Types

This is an attempt to create a fully distributed repository of IEC61499 Function Block types. This is the result of the work presented in the paper “Towards a Service-Oriented IEC 61499 compliant Engineering Support Environment” by Kleanthis Thramboulidis, Giannis Koumoutsos and George Doukas, that was presented in the 1^st Special Session on IEC61499 at the ETFA’06 Conference. (see abstract)

The approach exploits web services to allow:

a)     vendors (or function block developers) to develop generic and specific FB types and advertise them for sale (“sale” functionality is not yet supported) through the web infrastructure, and

b)     control engineers to increase reusability by locating already available FB type specifications and using them in the development process of their control applications.

Try using the Function Block types repository

You can use the services of the FB types repository to locate and get IEC61499 Function Block types by one of the following ways:

a)     Through the prototype client that was developed by SEG and can be downloaded and installed for free (see FBType Repository web service ).

b)     By developing your own client either from scratch based on the WSDL description of the service or utilising a custom class that was developed by SEG to encapsulate all the function of the WS.

You can also use the UDDI inquire API (see users guide) to discover the FBType Repository web service that was published to this UDDI.

How to contribute to this initiative

Vendors, FB type developers and IEC61499 researchers may contribute to this initiative through one of the following ways:

a)     Post their FB types to one of the already existing FB types Repository services,

b)     Create their own FB types Repository web service and publish it in a Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) repository. A new UDDI service may be developed or the already installed by SEG UDDI service can be used at this step. The already available UDDI (http://segws.ece.upatras.gr:8888/juddi/) is based on jUDDI, which is an open source Java implementation of the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification for Web Services.

c)     Create their own FB types Repository web service and publish it in their Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) repository.

UDDI is a "meta service" for locating web services by enabling robust queries against rich metadata.

For more information on how to contribute to this initiative you may contact George Doukas or Giannis Koumoutsos.