Towards Delta-Oriented Variability Modeling for IEC 61499

Modern production plants are complex Cyber-Physical Production Systems with an ever-increasing share of software controlling and automating their operation. The customization of these systems to the needs of their customers and their frequent evolution over a typically long life-cycle result in a plethora of variants to be managed. However, reuse still is mainly done in an opportunistic way, relying on copy-paste-modify strategies. More systematic, strategic reuse would help to reduce costs and time to market, but requires approaches that can be applied to domain-specific languages for developing distributed control software. In this paper, we propose an approach to manage variability in IEC 61499-based systems using delta-oriented variability modeling. We discuss open challenges and outline a research agenda for variability management in IEC 61499.