On Portability of IEC 61499 Compliant Structures and Systems

This paper investigates the portability features of three different IEC 61499 standard compliant tools. The study focuses on migrating the basic and composite function block types and system architecture with application networks and device configurations from one tool to another. A converter program is subsequently created using Python programming language to automate the required modification process, thus enabling the files to migrate between the compliant tools. The study takes into consideration NxtStudio, FBDK and 4DIAC software tools. In every tool, similar function blocks and system structures are created. The portability of these created elements is examined between the tools, resulting in a table that numerically evaluates the portability from one tool to another.Peer reviewe