Alois Zoitl holds a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering with focus on dynamic reconfiguration of real-time constrained control applications and a Master degree in Electrical Engineering with the focus on distributed industrial automation systems from Vienna University of Technology. Currently he is a Professor for cyber-physical systems for engineering and production with the Johannes Kepler University, Linz. He is also the scientific research group leader for Industrial Automation at the research institute fortiss in Munich, Germany. Before that he was the head of the research field Distributed Intelligent Automation Systems (Odo Struger Laboratory) at the Automation and Control Institute (ACIN), Vienna University of Technology. He is co-author of more than 150 publications (3 books, 6 book chapters, 19 journal articles) and the co-inventor of 4 patents in the mentioned areas. Alois Zoitl conducted and lead several industry funded R&D projects as well as coordinated and participated in several public funded (national as well as European) R&D projects. He is a founding member of the open source initiatives 4DIAC, providing a complete IEC 61499 solution, and OpENer. Furthermore, he is a member of the IEEE, the PLCopen user organization, and GMA. Since 2009 he is an active member of the IEC SC65B/WG15 for the distributed automation standard IEC 61499. He was named convenor of the group in May 2015.

Sandeep Patil received his PhD degree in computer science engineering from Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden. He is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Dependable Communication and Computation Systems Group, Lulea University of Technology, Lulea, Sweden. His research interests include programming distributed industrial automation software systems using IEC 61499 standard. He is an accomplished software engineering professional with over 10 years of research and development experience in systems and application software, including four years at Motorola India Pvt. Ltd., India, as a Senior Software Engineer.

Giuseppe Landolfi is Researcher and Lecturer at SUPSI-ISTePS. In 2008, he graduated in Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. He worked as software engineer in IT department of Alenia Aermacchi from 2008 to 2010, leading company in the design, production and support of military training aircraft. During this work experience, he realized integration between heterogeneous systems such as SAP, EMC Documentum and COBOL applications. He also designed and developed mobile applications through BlackBerry Enterprise architecture. He is specialized in C/C++ and Java programming, software development and applications development on J2EE and NET framework, web services development and iOS programming. Currently he is a teacher in SUPSI in many courses, including computer science foundations and Industry 4.0.

Dmitrii Drozdov is a researcher at Luleå University of Technology and a CTO at FlexBridge AB - a Swedish startup company with the goal to bring the future flexible control systems into the present automation world. He graduated from Penza State University in Russia, has been working for three years as an embedded software engineer, after which pursued his PhD study with the goal of dual degree in Industrial informatics and computer engineering. During that study, the idea for FlexBridge has emerged and he is now co-founder and CTO there. Dmitrii's area of expertise includes advanced design techniques for IEC 61499, hardware-software ecosystems for Industrial IoT and formal verification of distributed control systems.