The increasing installation of distributed energy resources during the last years has lead to a fundamental change of the power system structure. As a consequence, utility operators are faced with new challenges in grid planning and operation. New and intelligent approaches-like smart grids-show promising results in increasing the hosting capacity for distributed and renewable resources. Standardized automation, control, and communication systems are important keys to realize such intelligent methods. In this paper, a standard-based control approach for distributed energy resources is introduced and implemented. It uses the IEC 61850 interoperability approach as well as the IEC 61499 reference model for distributed automation. Elementary implementation guidelines are provided to handle the hierarchical architecture of distributed control applications. In order to show the advantages of the proposed approach, a simulation example and a laboratory test are demonstrated using a prototypical open-source-based implementation.