Bachelor and Master Theses

IEC 61499 [1] is an international standard for distributed automation systems that introduces a component-based and event-driven approach to industrial control, offering greater flexibility than the traditional IEC 61131-3 standard. It centers around function blocks, which encapsulate both data and behavior, enabling modular and reusable design. Unlike the cyclic scan model of IEC 61131-3, IEC 61499 uses event-based execution, allowing for more responsive and efficient control. The standard supports the distribution of control logic across multiple devices, making it well-suited for Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT applications, where scalability, interoperability, and adaptability are key.

In distributed real-time distributed systems, analyzing end-to-end data-propagation delays [2]—such as data age and reaction time—is essential for demonstrating timing predictability. These delays must be computed during the design phase and validated against system timing constraints [3]. While some existing research addresses worst-case execution time [4] and response-time analysis [5] for IEC 61499-based systems, there is currently no method for extracting end-to-end timing models [6,7] from such systems, nor for performing end-to-end data-propagation delay analysis.

This thesis aims to develop a systematic method for extracting end-to-end timing models from software architectures built using IEC 61499. These models will then be used to support timing analysis of data-propagation delays across distributed components, enabling design-time validation of timing constraints.

Thesis Tasks:

1. Study the modeling of software architectures using function blocks in IEC 61499.
2. Review existing timing analysis techniques for IEC 61499-based systems.
3. Develop a method for extracting end-to-end timing models from IEC 61499-based architectures.
4. Apply the extracted models to perform end-to-end data-propagation delay analysis.
5. Evaluate the method using industry-inspired use cases.
6. Document the methodology, results, findings and conclusions in a thesis report.

References:

[1] IEC, IEC 61499-1:2012 Standard- Function blocks – Part 1: Architecture, International Electrotechnical Commission, Geneva, Switzerland, Nov. 2012.

[2] Matthias Becker, Dakshina Dasari, Saad Mubeen, Moris Behnam, Thomas Nolte, End-to-end timing analysis of cause-effect chains in automotive embedded systems, Journal of Systems Architecture, Volume 80, 2017.

[3] Mubeen, S., Nolte, T., Sjödin, M. et al. Supporting timing analysis of vehicular embedded systems through the refinement of timing constraints. Softw Syst Model 18, 39–69 (2019)

[4] L. Lednicki, J. Carlson, and K. Sandström. Model level worst-case execution time analysis for IEC 61499, 16th International ACM Sigsoft symposium on Component-based software engineering (CBSE), 2013.

[5] P. Lindgren, J. Eriksson, M. Lindner, A. Lindner, D. Pereira and L. M. Pinho, "Response time for IEC 61499 over Ethernet," 13th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN), 2015.

[6] Mubeen, S., Gålnander, M., Lundbäck, J., Lundbäck, KL. (2018). Extracting Timing Models from Component-Based Multi-Criticality Vehicular Embedded Systems. In: Latifi, S. (eds) Information Technology - New Generations. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 738. Springer, Cham.

[7] B. Houtan et al., "End-to-end Timing Modeling and Analysis of TSN in Component-Based Vehicular Software," 26th IEEE International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC), 2023.

1-    The students should be familiar with real-time systems, real-time scheduling and schedulability analysis.

2-    Good programming skills.

Potential Compnay collaboration/support: Arcticus Systems AB