End-to-End Response Time of IEC 61499 Distributed Applications Over Switched Ethernet

The IEC 61499 standard provides means to specify distributed control systems in terms of function blocks. For the deployment, each device may hold one or many logical resources, each consisting of a function block network with service interface blocks at the edges. The execution model is event driven (asynchronous), where triggering events may be associated with data (and seen as messages). In this paper, we propose a low-complexity implementation technique allowing to assess end-to-end response times of event chains spanning over a set of networked devices. Based on a translation of IEC 61499 to RTFM 1 1 Real-time for the masses.