ECENT developments in the field of manufacturing evolved a series of new concepts beginning with the inception of Lean Manufacturing and going through Fractal and Bionic to the evolution of Holonic or Agent-based Manufacturing

Proceedings of the 8 International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems (WODES 2006), Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, pp. 176-181, July 2006. Abstract—The introduction of distributed systems to the automation area not only brought new design methods but also new analysis problems. This paper is an attempt to survey current approaches in modeling systems based on the recent standard IEC 61499 and to point out some open problems. The modeling approaches can be classified into two groups namely those dealing with design problems and those dealing principally with formal analysis. The survey notes some design approaches but then focuses on the formal approaches. It also points out the open issues and problems within the standard (execution model, event-handling, and data-handling) which are leading to differences in various formal approaches used for analyzing the IEC 61499 applications.