Events, Not Scans: IEC 61499 and Open Process Automation

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 6m

Leila Darwish, the digital twin and data architect at the Al Sahil Gas Complex, has been asked a deceptively simple question by the operator's technology committee: should the next expansion be built on an open, vendor-neutral control architecture? Tomás Iglesias, the integration engineer from the vendor's FAT shop, thinks it is a trap. Over one long evening they take apart IEC 61499, the standard that replaced the PLC's endless scan with events and let a single application span many devices, and follow it from university labs to a resin plant in Louisiana that ripped out its DCS. What open…