New technologies and standards are emerging which will have a dramatic effect on the design and implementation of future industrial control systems. PLCs and PC-based soft controllers are beginning to use software components, for example function blocks, to business systems. New tools and techniques are needed to design and model these systems, such as UML and modern fieldbus technology. The IEC 61499 standard has been developed specifically to model distributed control systems. Practical tools based on IEC 61499 are likely to emerge soon to model, validate and simulate the behaviour of complex networks of function blocks and it is expected that this standard will become key to highly-developed distributed systems. Modelling control systems using IEC 61499 provides a concise yet thorough introduction to the main concepts and models defined in the IEC 61499 standard, and particularly the use of function blocks. Incorporating industrially relevant examples to show how these can be applied, the book is ideal as a user-guide for the application of the standard for modelling distributed systems. The book will be of particular relevance to those working in industrial control, software engineering, mechatronics and manufacturing systems.