The IEC 61499 standard proposes an event driven execution model for component based (in terms of Function Blocks), distributed industrial automation applications. However, the standard provides only an informal execution semantics, thus in consequence behavior and correctness relies on the design decisions made by the tool vendor. In this paper we present the formalization of a subset of the IEC 61499 standard in order to provide an underpinning for the static verification of Function Block models by means of deductive reasoning. Specifically, we contribute by addressing verification at the component, algorithm, and ECC levels. From Function Block descriptions, enriched with formal contracts, we show that correctness of component compositions, as well as functional and transitional behavior can be ensured. Feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by manually encoding a set of representative use-cases in WhyML, for which the verification conditions are automatically derived (through the Why3 platform) and discharged (using automatic SMT-based solvers). Furthermore, we discuss opportunities and challenges towards deriving certified executables for IEC 61499 models.