The initiative

Our Vision

Having an open and interoperable way of managing the development and deployment of distributed real-time control applications – at industrial level but not limited to - based on the existing IEC-61499 international standard and its future improvements

Our Mission

Create an international network of Technology Transfer stakeholders to foster the adoption of the IEC61499 standard as the reference in industrial automation for real-time distributed intelligent systems, creating a live community to sustain its market acceptance.

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The Objectives of the ECN for IEC61499

  • Offer a single point of access to the existing and future know-how, but theoretical and applied, of IEC-61499 and of its several applications, within and without the industrial automation domain;
  • Create an active ecosystem of technology provides and users, interested in distributed control and intelligent systems, to share solutions and best practices for an effective adoption of the IEC-61499;
  • Promote an environment for open competition between different implementations of the standard, supporting the strengths of its interoperable approach and providing up-to-date comparisons;
  • Offer dedicated technology transfer and training services – through its composing Competence Centres – to those companies willing to test the IEC-61499 on their production processes or systems;
  • Guarantee access to a network of public demonstrator around Europe, where members of the community could see and test the effectiveness of the standard and of its applications;
  • Offer a collaborative portal to aggregate European research projects directly or implicitly linked to IEC-61499, maximizing the effectiveness of their communication and exploitation effort.

The ECN approach

The rationale for the creation of the ECN has been the increasing awareness of the advantages coming from the use of the technologies based on the IEC-61499, and how such a standard has all the prerequisite to become one of the cornerstone for Industry 4.0. Sharing this common vision and the mission to bring IEC-61499 to full industrial maturity, each competence centre of the Network undertakes to provide technology transfers services both at European and regional level, reaching a wider range of stakeholders interested in the application of the standard to their processes and systems.

In their daily activities, the competence centres shall:

  • At regional level, operate to become a recognized point of reference for all know-how related to IEC-61499, as much as a nexus to the surrounding technology transfer stakeholders (universities, research centres, innovation hubs, etc.) that could support the market transfer of the standard;
  • At European level, act as an aggregated and unified entity, to maximize the efforts of international cooperation, to define common strategies of strategic support to the acceptance of the standard, to communicate with the institutional stakeholders (European Commission, CEN/CENELEC, EEN, etc.) and bring forward the relevance of IEC-61499 for Industry 4.0

Following this approach, the ENC Portal has been developed to guarantee a free access to everyone interested in further information about the network, its activities and the services it will progressively launch during the months.

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