IEC 61499 - an innovation in automation

The IEC 61499 standard is the follow-up of the IEC61131

The IEC 61499 dispels failures of the IEC 61131. It is a new standard that exceeds the possibilities of the IEC 61131 by far.

IEC 61499 enables engineering of complete, distributed systems and not only single devices like with IEC 61131. As an important point IEC 61499 extensively supports hardware-independent engineering.

The IEC 61499 describes three main topics:

Portability: the ability of software tools to accept and correctly interpret library elements produced by other software tools.

Configurability: the ability of devices and their software components to be configured (selected, assigned locations, interconnected and parameterized) by multiple software tools.

Interoperability: the ability of devices from different vendors operating together to perform the functions specified by one or more distributed applications.