The design and implementation of the control and integration software of a flexible manufacturing system

The concepts of a methodology for designing and implementing the control and integration software of computer-integrated manufacturing systems are presented. The goal of this methodology is to build flexible and reusable software. Software flexibility is obtained by decoupling the process plan models from the factory floor model and by designing generic control algorithms. Reusability is achieved by building self-contained software/hardware components with general, possibility parametrized, interfaces. These reusable components can be used to populate manufacturing software libraries. Off-the-shelf components can then be assembled into manufacturing systems. Moreover, the interplay between simulated and actual hardware internals of software/hardware components is used as the basis of a testing strategy that performs offline simulation followed by incremental online testing. The application of the methodology to the design and implementation of the control and integration software of a prismatic machining cell is reported. A highly efficient implementation of this software has been carried out in the Ada programming language and is fully operational