Why not use a general-purpose distributed object model, like DCOM or CORBA?
• Implementation of the features specified for these information-technology models would be too expensive, and their performance would almost always be too slow, for use in a distributed real-time industrial-process measurement and control system (IPMCS). • There is no standard, easily understood graphical model for representing the interconnections of events and data among these kinds of objects in distributed applications. • Are data and event connections a kind of object? Data and event connections can be considered objects insofar as IEC 61499 defines a textual syntax for their declaration and a management service for their creation, query and deletion. However, the only attributes that IEC 61499 defines for a connection are its source and destination. Software tools may require additional attributes, such as scheduling priority for event connections, communication timeliness constraints for both data and event connections in order to determine whether a proposed system configurati
