Abstract— The function block concept has been proposed by recent IEC standards for the development of distributed Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCSs). However the function block approach is purely functional and does not exploit the benefits of the Object Technology. Object Orientation is now a mature technology with many remarkable commercial tools supporting the whole software life cycle. The Unified Modeling Language is becoming the de-facto standard and is currently adopted by the majority of modern CASE tools. In this paper we consider the use of the UML not only during the development phase of the Engineering Support System (ESS) but also for the development of distributed IPMCS applications. A notation is proposed along with a network topology and an interworking unit architecture to form the infrastructure that is necessary for the development of the new generation ESSs. Index Terms—Engineering Support System, distributed IPMCS, control applications, fieldbus, UML. I. INTRODUCTION Today’s rapidly changing market requirements impose the need of improving the agility of manufacturing systems. The always growing need for innovative products, forces manufacturing plants to improve their ability to quickly respond to market demands by designing competitive products and modifying existing ones. Until recently, most of the industrial control systems have been based either on traditional distributed control systems or on programmable logic controllers. In both cases, the systems are composed of monolithic applications that are almost impossible to integrate and even to expand. Modularity, flexibility, extensibility, reusability and interoperability are dimension slightingly addressed by many traditional proprietary engineering tools and products. Even more, the most of the traditional products and tools are far away from the new challenging technologies of Software Engineering. Evolving standards, like IEC 61499 and the more recent IEC61804, define the basic concepts and a methodology for the design of modular, re-usable, distributed industrial process, measurement and control systems [1][2]. They define, the function block construct as the main building block of IPMCS applications, in a format that is independent of implementation. Kleanthis C. Thramboulidis is with Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, University of Patras, 265 00 Patras, Greece. E-mail: thrambo@ee.upatras.gr They also define, the way that function blocks can be used to define robust, re-usable software components that constitute the distributed IPMCSs [3]. The aforementioned standards define also a methodology to be used by system designers to construct distributed control systems. It allows systems to be defined in terms of logically connected function blocks that run on different processing resources. Complete applications, can be built from network of function blocks, formed by interconnecting their inputs and outputs. New generation function block oriented Engineering Support Systems (ESS), are highly required to support the whole life cycle of IPMCS applications. An ESS must support the Engineer, in both the analysis and design phase as well as in the implementation phase. Using such a system, the engineer must be able to start with the analysis of the plant diagram so as to capture the control requirements. Then, he should be able to define the major areas of functionality and their interaction with the plant. During this task, he should be able, to exploit function blocks provided by intelligent field devices such as smart valves, but also to assign functionality into physical resources such as PLCs, instruments and controllers. All the above should be accomplished independent of the underlying communication subsystem and in the extreme case, where the underlying subsystem is an aggregation of interconnect independent fieldbus segments, even from different vendors. Part 2 of the IEC 61499, presents a model of the engineering tasks to be performed in the design, implementation, operation and maintenance of distributed IPMCSs [4]. It also defines general requirements for software tools to support the associated engineering tasks. These tools are assumed to form parts of an Engineering Support System (ESS). The whole approach is classified as incremental with three main phases: evaluate, improve and operate. It further proceeds to the definition of the improvement phase, which may be considered as composed of design, validation, installation and testing sub-phases. Validation sub-phase is attracting a major interest since it includes a sequence of validation operations like correctness and consistency checking and simulation. These operations are among the most challenging ones in modern CASE tools. IEC 61499-2 also states that IEC-related software tools will be considered as successful if they provide among others: • Software encapsulation and re-use • System configuration support Kleanthis C. Thramboulidis, Member IEEE Towards a UML based Engineering Support System