Control System Software Design Methodology for Automotive Industry

As automated manufacturing systems become more and more complex, the need for new methodologies to improve the design and development of industrial monitoring and control solutions is becoming peremptory. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) dominates the application domain meaning that they are established as the most popular industrial controllers used in factory and shop floor. Although the capabilities of these controllers have strongly improved in the last decades, their historical background as the easy understand by the electricians who had previously worked on electrical systems has meant that the de-facto standard for the implementation of control and monitoring solution for these devices remains the ladder logic. However, to face the globalization challenges, the manufacturing companies needs to improve their productivity by reducing the costs, delivering high-quality of products with high variety and improving their responsiveness to changing market condition. Moreover productivity gains can also be achieved by reducing the life-cycle costs of manufacturing production systems implying the using of more flexible and agile approaches. In this scenario, the proposed methodology aims to provide a homogeneous and optimum process that, starting from a set of mechanical specifications and behavioural models of machines, enable the generation of industrial logic automatically ensuring the same structure and naming standard in every project and the quality of the code.