Factory-level control consolidation using Event-Condition-Action: Case study on the reconfigurable factory testbed

During its lifetime, a manufacturing system often has added functionalities or significant changes to its control system that can result in a broken control hierarchy, causing problems with debugging and reconfiguration. For the up- and-coming field of reconfigurable manufacturing systems, poor reconfigurability is especially problematic. A procedure for restructuring a standard control hierarchy is presented, including how to decide where to move particular logic and preserve event-condition-action (ECA) based structure, when originally present. This procedure is applied to an ECA-based case study - the Reconfigurable Factory Testbed at the University of Michigan - to demonstrate its use. Additional lessons learned about ECA´s role in restructuring are also presented through the case study.