Design of integrated manufacturing system control software

Teichroew

1993

Self Cite

Abstract. The complexity and diversity of manufacturing software and the need to adapt this software to the frequent changes in the production requirements necessitate the use of a systematic approach to developing this software. The software life-cycle model (Royce, 1970) that consists of specifying the requirements of a software system, designing, implementing, testing, and evolving this software can be followed when developing large portions of manufacturing software. However, the presence of hardware devices in these systems and the high costs of acquiring and operating hardware devices further complicate the manufacturing software development process and require that the functionality of this software be extended to incorporate simulation and prototyping. This paper reviews recent methods for planning, scheduling, simulating, and monitoring the operation of manufacturing systems. A synopsis of the approaches to designing and implementing the real-time control software of these systems is presented. It is concluded that current methodologies support, in a very restricted sense, these planning, scheduling, and monitoring activities, and that enhanced performance can be achieved via an integrated approach.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing manufacturing control software: A survey and critique

Teichroew

1993

Self Cite

“…A software/hardware component (Naylor and Volz 1987) generalizes the concept of a software component by allowing the internals of the component to encapsulate hardware Volz, Mudge and Gal 1984); i.e., these internals are interfaced to and drive hardware devices, and are similar to the device drivers that translate generic requests or outputs from a computer operating system into formats and commands that the particular peripheral device can interpret. In a computer system, typical output devices include mice, graphics tablets, displays, disk or diskette drives, compact-disk ROMs, plotters, dot-matrix, daisy-wheel, and laser printers.…”

Section: Designing Software~hardware Componentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A rule consists of a set of preconditions followed by a set of postconditions, and is associated with a logical variable and a duration (Naylor and Maletz 1986;Naylor and Volz 1987). Whenever the preconditions of a rule are satisfied by the current state of the system, and the rule is selected by enabling its logical variable, the postconditions of this rule become satisfied by the state of the system after the specified duration (time delay).…”

Section: Using Formal Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A specification language for planning and fault recovery in manufacturing systems

1993

Self Cite

Abstract. This paper presents the syntax and semantics of a component-oriented rule-based language for specifying the formal models of manufacturing systems. A model captures the state of a component of the system in a set of first-order logic predicates, and it captures the semantics of the operations performed by this component in a set of rules that determine the preconditions and postconditions of an operation. The models are then used to plan the sequence of operations of each class of jobs to be manufactured by these systems. A plan-oriented fault detection and correction strategy is proposed. This strategy can automatically handle any combination of faults that may occur when monitoring the operations of manufacturing systems. A fault-tree is consulted prior to executing the scheduled operations of a plan, and the faults that affect the execution of these operations are handled subsequently. Resuming the original cyclic schedule is attempted, whenever feasible. As a proof of concept, a prototype implementation of both the main constructs of the component-oriented rule-based language and the planning and fault-recovery algorithms presented in this paper have been completed. This prototype is implemented on a Unix-based system in the Ada programming language. The specification of a manufacturing system is first expressed in the proposed language. These statements are then translated into Ada code. This code is next compiled by a Verdix Ada compiler and is executed in order to create and populate the model data structure of the system. A detailed plan of execution and a set of fault-recovery plans may then be derived for a job to be manufactured on this system.

“…For these systems, designing and implementing their required software has proven to be a daunting problem; the current practices for such software are archaic and often result in a high cost, an extended development period, and extremely inflexible systems (Naylor and Volz 1987;Ben Hadj Alouane, Chaar and Naylor 1990). Hence, the development of this software can benefit from the methodologies used in developing the software of the more general class of realtime embedded systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time software methodologies: Are they suitable for developing Manufacturing control software?

Teichroew

1993

Self Cite

Abstract. Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) systems may be classified as real-time systems. Hence, the applicability of methodologies that are developed for specifying, designing, implementing, testing, and evolving real-time software is investigated in this article.The paper highlights the activities of the software development process. Among these activities, a great emphasis is placed on automating the software requirements specification activity, and a set of formal models and languages for specifying these requirements is presented. Moreover, a synopsis of the real-time software methodologies that have been implemented by the academic and industrial communities is presented together with a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of these methodologies.The possible use of the real-time methodologies in developing the control software of efficient and dependable manufacturing systems is explored. In these systems, efficiency is achieved by increasing the level of concurrency of the operations of a plan, and by scheduling the execution of these operations with the intent of maximizing the utilization of the devices of their systems. On the other hand, dependability requires monitoring the operations of these systems. This monitoring activity facilitates the detection of faults that may occur when executing the scheduled operations of a plan, recovering from these faults, and, whenever feasible, resuming the original schedule of the system. The paper concludes that the set of surveyed methodologies may be used to develop the real-time control software of efficient and dependable manufacturing systems. However, an integrated approach to planning, scheduling, and monitoring the operations of these systems will significantly enhance their utility, and no such approach is supported by any of these methodologies.