Engineering of Communication Links with AADL in IEC 61499 Automation and Control Systems

Today's automation systems are increasingly composed of heterogeneous distributed components. The components of such systems communicate via different protocols and need to provide a pre-specified quality of service (QoS). For modeling such distributed applications new concepts like the standard IEC 61499 are available. But IEC 61499 does not sufficiently cover the description of the communication properties between subcomponents. However the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) seems to allow sufficiently formal modelling of communication parameters and QoS parameters. This paper compares the application modelling with IEC 61499 and AADL on the basis of a simple example and shows an approach how to map IEC 61499 applications to AADL. Both contribute to derivation of communication links between reliable distributed real time components automatically out of a system independent application description, a system description and mapping parameters.