Using qualitative modelling for designing control architectures

Summary form only given. The paper describes a qualitative modelling toolbox for designing and developing application independent architectures. The domain chosen to demonstrate the versatility of the work is an advanced robotics workcell that is part of a knowledge-based automation laboratory. Developed out of a remote monitoring application, the toolbox uses object-oriented software and encapsulates knowledge-based information from a human expert to construct the model. Being object-oriented there is full inheritance between individual objects. It was considered feasible that the original work could be the basis of a design tool for automation architectures