A Distributed Control Environment for Reconfigurable Manufacturing
A Distributed Control Environment for Reconfigurable Manufacturing
Future manufacturing is envisioned to be highly flexible and adaptable. New technologies for efficient engineering of safe, fault-tolerant and downtimeless systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision. Without such solutions, engineering adaptations of Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) will exceed the costs of engineering the initial system by far and the reuse of equipment will become inefficient. In this work a new approach for a model driven, component based development of distributed, downtimeless real–time control, the controlled evolution of IACS and their execution during their adaptation based on the standard IEC 61499 is proposed. This new method increases engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based IACS significantly.
Unfortunately I was not able to attend the presentation of this paper so I apologize if my questions have been already addressed there.
Could you please provide some information about the runtime environment (execution environment) as well as the implementation model of the IEC61499 Function Block based control application, which have been used as infrustructure for the proposed new engineering method for reconfiguration?
It would be very interesting to have some information on the new execution environment that is based on the standard IEC61499 that you proposed( sa stated in conclusions) to be used as basis for the system evolution execution.
The whole approach is characterized in abstract as "model driven, component based development". However it is not clear in the rest of the paper what model driven and component based mean in the context of the work presented.
Some explanation on the way that the presented in Fig 1 function block can be used for reconfiguration will be helpfull too.
Thank you for this most interesting paper. It gives us a good idea about some of Profactor's work in the PAC Cluster of I*PROMS.
Could you please provide further information on the tests you carried out to demonstrate the reconfiguration ability of the proposed system?