Did you know about the IEC 61499 deployment magic: one software application runs on a network of heterogeneous devices?

A program in IEC 61499 is a network of function blocks, so one can confuse it with the FBD language of IEC 61131-3. But the difference is tremendous. The function block network of IEC 61499 is much more powerful!

Thanks to the event-based connections, the blocks work only when activated by events, not all the time as in usual PLCs. And the network presents a system-level view of the entire distributed system functionality, where single blocks may be running in different devices such as embedded controllers, communication hubs, HMI panels, edge servers, and many more.