Adaptive Manufacturing is identified by the European High-Level Group (ManuFuture2004 – supported by the European Commission) as one of four major drivers of industrial technologies in ‘Manufacturing 2020’. New technologies for efficient engineering of safe, fault-tolerant and downtimeless systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision of future manufacturing. Without such solutions, en-gineering adaptations of the Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) will by far exceed the costs of engineering the initial system and the reuse of equipment becomes inefficient. Therefore, cost efficient engineering of controlled evolution of systems and its safe and fault-tolerant realisation, free of costly downtimes, will become an important economic factor. The strongest industrial demand for controlled system evolution is identified for applications that require guaranteed safe and stabile op-eration for economical, dependability or QoS reasons, while the market and the environment are highly volatile.

εCEDAC aims at delivering the radical innovations necessary for model driven, component based development of safe, downtimeless, distributed embedded control and for fault-tolerant, controlled evolution of IACS during their adaptation. Furthermore, εCEDAC significantly increase engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based IACS. It simplifies the transition from device-centred towards application-centred engineering of both control and evolution-control applications. Based on existing Control Modelling Languages (CMLs like Simulink or IEC 61499) εCEDAC introduces εCML, a new Evolution Control Modelling Language as a main innovation. εCML allows to model both process-control AND evolution-control applications in a similar way. Therefore it satisfies the preferences of domain experts in the IACS sector, who are rather application experts than programming experts. The second essential innovation of this project is a novel hardware capability model for a new calculus featuring a detailed vector of actually available computing resources in a system.

These two main innovations allow to provide an integrated engineering support for εCML and deliver the prerequisite for verification and validation of control execution AND evolution execution regarding time, computing space and value. Thus system evolution will be safe and fault-tolerant.