A Case Study of Utilizing the SMT Solver for Deployment Optimization of an IEC 61499-based Application

The capabilities of dynamicity, flexibility and agile production are enablers to Smart Factory and Industry 4.0. One critical feature to achieve these capabilities is to achieve efficient deployment optimization for automation control applications. However, many factories have used control applications implemented using IEC 61131 rather than IEC 61499, even though IEC 61499 standard supports Smart Factory better than IEC 61131 standard with distribution and event-driven features. In this paper, we are studying a control application, named HotWaterTank, implemented via IEC 61499. This application can control a hot water tank via several buttons, such as inlet, outlet and heating buttons. Three steps are carried out to deployment optimization with this application that are 1) Flattening, 2) Penalty matrix calculation, and 3) SMT solver calculation. Finally, from the experimental results, we prove that the deployment formulas we proposed can help achieve deployment optimization results while reducing the execution time of the SMT solver. Besides, we also discuss the parameter-related impact on the execution time and optimization results. Our contribution is to investigate the possibilities and difficulties of introducing the SMT solver and containerization technology to the IEC 61499-based application denloyment optimization.