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W. Lepuschitz, M. Vallee, A. Zoitl, M. Merdan:
"Online Reconfiguration of the Low Level Control for Automation Agents";
Talk: IEEE Internatonal Conference on Industrial Control and Instrumentation (IECON), Glendale, AZ, USA; 11-07-2010 - 11-10-2010; in: "CDROM Proceedings IECON 2010 36th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society", (2010), ISBN: 978-1-4244-5226-2; 1359 - 1364.

Addressing changing market conditions and customer
needs requires more flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing
systems. Distributed intelligent control systems based
on agent technologies are seen as a promising approach to
provide reconfiguration abilities. Existing work has been focused
on the reconfiguration of higher layers concerned with production
planning and scheduling. However, a different approach is needed
for reconfiguration of the control software at a lower level closer
to physical components, in order to enable a better adaptation
to changes and disturbances in the local environment.
In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of online reconfiguration
of the low level control for automation agents. Our
approach relies on a reconfiguration infrastructure for real-time
control software based on the IEC 61499 standard. We detail the
features of this infrastructure as well as its integration within the
architecture of an automation agent. We also describe an implementation
example with timing measurements showing the ability
for rapid reconfiguration. Using our approach, reconfiguration
can be performed locally without the need to restart the control
system.