OOONEIDA is a new initiative for enabling decentralized, re-configurable industrial control and automation in discrete manufacturing and continuous process systems. The goal of the OOONEIDA is the creation of the technological infrastructure for a new, open knowledge economy for automation components and automated industrial products. This will be done by further development of the concept of reusable portable software modules (function blocks), and by their application in the time- and cost-effective specification, design, validation, realization and deployment of intelligent mechatronic components in distributed industrial automation and control systems.