Implementing a Control System Framework for Automatic Generation of Manufacturing Cell Controllers

Quickly adapting the manufacturing system to the production of new or modified products is critical for manufacturers in order to stay competitive. For flexible manufacturing systems this typically implies modifications of the control programs. In previous work a framework for automatic generation of cell controllers has been developed. In this paper an implementation of the framework is presented. Important properties of the presented implementation are: the information from earlier design phases is reused; automatic code generation for faster development and reduced implementation errors; the supervisory control theory is used to generate control functions that are correct by construction; object oriented principles are used in order to allow the reuse of existing library functions. The implementation is generic in the sense that it may generate control programs for a number of target platforms, but in this paper the focus is on generating a control program for the Java platform. An industrial example of a reconfigurable manufacturing cell has been used in the implementation process and shows that the framework is feasible for large manufacturing systems.