Eclipse 4diac(tm) is an open source PLC environment allowing to implement industrial control solutions in a vendor neutral way. 4diac implements IEC 61499 extending IEC 61131-3 with better support for controller to controller communication and dynamic reconfiguration. With that 4diac provides the infrastructure for industrie 4.0 and industrial IoT.
The 4diac IDE is based on the Eclipse framework, which allows an easy integration of other plug-ins to the 4diac IDE providing new or extended functionality. IEC 61499 based systems follow an application centric design, which means that the application of the overall system is created at first. Each application is created by interconnecting the desired function blocks (FB) in terms of a function block network (FBN). As soon as the hardware structure is known it can be added to a project's system configuration and the already existing application can be distributed onto the available devices.
Comments and Reviews
An ambitious project, to fully use it you would still need to adapt it to your specific platform (mostly glue code), but because it is fully open, you can! It certainly is not as ready to go as the proprietary development environments for most PLCs or Codesys, but if you are looking for a development environment for your distributed system, 4Diac seems up to the task.