Future market demands urge for 'real-time adaptable' equipment for production of goods, energy and services without any downtime and minimal cost for change. Therefore, next generation automation and control systems are considered to be agile: scaleable, intelligent and embedded, reconfigurable and robust - flexible but with zero downtimes. Current approaches like holonic control only act at the higher control levels. A problem is that low-level real-time device control (nowadays Programmable Logic Controller or PLC level) does not sufficiently support distribution and scalability and ignores reconfigurabilty up to now. For a real breakthrough of agile concepts also the low-level control has to support reconfigurability, scalability and distribution into functional complete modules - at low level even in real-time!

This project radically innovates industrial automation and control systems by introducing a new technology called µCron technology. µCrons stand for 'Micro-Holons', which are online-reconfigurable real-time controlled mechatronic basic building blocks for next generation agile systems.

In the 8 to 10 years range µCrons are expected to provide the basis for a breakthrough of such agile systems. For the mid range of 4 to 8 years the new technology will give rise to a range of completely new, active, reconfigurable embedded automation components that allow to compose and change systems out of Plug & Work components also during full operation with 'zero downtime'. Mechatronic engineering methods like the 'Automation Objects' concept will become possible.

This work focuses on the provision of a middleware for µCrons that is able to execute industrial automation and control software in real-time, allows µCron software to migrate across heterogeneous embeddeds systems on different µCrons without having any sources available and ultimately provides services for transition management.