Building industrial CPS with the IEC 61499 standard on low-cost hardware platforms

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are at the core of the future industrial control systems. Most industrial CPSs are usually implemented over expensive and domain-specific hardware platforms, such as industrial embedded control systems, mainly for safety and security reasons. In less-critical applications the use of open, low-cost hardware platforms that provide adequate computing capabilities, such as microcontroller test boards, may provide an interesting alternative to reduce costs and reduce prototyping time. However, for most automation engineers working with this kind of platforms may become a daunting task because of the new concepts to be learnt. So, in the authors' view, it could be very valuable easing the application of current industrial standards on top of such low-cost platforms. In particular, the IEC 61499 standard provides a higher level of design, which allows combining software components in a flexible way, with independence of the underlying hardware. This work addresses the design of applications by means of the IEC 61499 standard on top of Raspberry Pi boards.