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IEC 61499 provides a standardized approach for the development of distributed control systems. The standard introduces a component architecture, based on function blocks that are event-triggered components processing data and signals. However, it gives only limited support for the design of reconfigurable architectures. In particular, handling of several reconfiguration scenarios is quite heavy on this level since a scenario changes the execution model of the system due to requirements. To this end, a new IEC 61499-based model named reconfigurable function blocks (RFBs) is proposed. An RFB processes the reconfiguration events and switches directly to the suitable configuration using a hierarchical state machine model. The latter represents the reconfiguration model which reacts on changes in the environment in order to find an adequate reconfiguration scenario to be executed. Each scenario presents a …