Granularity Cost Analysis for Function Block as a Service The main challenge of exposing IEC61499 or IEC611313 Function Blocks as a service remains in adopting serviceoriented concepts in function block programming. Implementing an IEC61499 or IEC611313 Function Block that is being accessed via serviceoriented protocols is straight forward. The main challenge remains in modeling a Function Block as a service. Adopting serviceoriented concepts like Service Oriented Architecture or Microservice Architecture requires tackling challenges like service granularity, (de)composition, etc. For instance, too coarsegrained services could lead to significant drawbacks, while too finegrained services could increase the systemxe2x80x99s overall complexity, introducing semantic tight coupling and bringing about communication overhead. Therefore, understanding whether a service (de)composition is adding any value could help us to identify the best service granularity. Finding the best service granularity means knowing how many Function Blocks could be exposed into one service. This could undeniable lead to improvement in resource consumption especially in constraint environments. In this paper we design a cost analysis function for calculating the overhead of service decomposition. This work will help to answer one of the most important aspects of the serviceoriented approach, called service granularity in the scope of Function Block as a Service.

Towards IEC 61499 Based Distributed Intelligent Automation: Design and Computing Perspectives The IEC 61499 standard has been proposed for development of nextgeneration industrial automation systems to support portability, interoperability, and configurability. Compared with the traditional IEC 611313 standard, it provides an open reference architecture with some key features: objectoriented modeling by using function blocks as basic elements, and eventdriven execution by using dataevents as inputoutput. Recently IEC 61499 has been integrated with its enabling technologies to realize distributed intelligent automation for industrial cyberphysical systems. In this paper, two perspectives are provided through analysis of recent research: a) design paradigms for IEC 61499, including objectoriented design, componentbased design, and serviceoriented architecture; and b) computing paradigms for IEC 61499, including distributed intelligence, autonomic computing, and cloud computing. Future research trends are also outlined as a conclusion.