  The IEC 61499 reference model provides an international standard developed
specifically for supporting the creation of distributed event-based automation
systems. Functionality is abstracted into function blocks which can be coded
graphically as well as via a text-based method. As one of the design goals was
the ability to support distributed control applications, communication plays a
central role in the IEC 61499 specification. In order to enable the deployment
of functionality to distributed platforms, these platforms need to exchange
data in a variety of protocols. IEC 61499 realizes the support of these
protocols via "Service Interface Function Blocks" (SIFBs). In the context of
smart grids and energy applications, IEC 61499 could play an important role, as
these applications require coordinating several distributed control logics.
Yet, the support of grid-related protocols is a pre-condition for a wide-spread
utilization of IEC 61499. The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
on the other hand is a well-established protocol for messaging, which has
recently been adopted for smart grid communication. Thus, SIFBs for XMPP
facilitate distributed control applications, which use XMPP for exchanging all
control relevant data, being realized with the help of IEC 61499. This paper
introduces the idea of integrating XMPP into SIFBs, demonstrates the
prototypical implementation in an open source IEC 61499 platform and provides
an evaluation of the feasibility of the result.
