Autonomous decentralized software structure for integration of information and control systems

A new software structure for integrating information and control systems has been developed. In conventional manufacturing systems, these two kinds of systems are separated and connected by gateways in a hierarchical structure. Both systems need to be integrated, however, in order to increase productivity and to enable the systems to be modified frequently. Timely production and frequent rescheduling of production are required in order to meet rapid changes in customer demands. These integrated systems must also be expandable and flexible. The differences of properties between information and control systems had made it impossible to integrate these systems, so an autonomous decentralized software structure implemented using three new technologies is proposed. These technologies are a timer trigger mechanism that manages the triggering of different kinds of information and control application programs, an interface management mechanism that manages different kinds of data received by these programs, and a message filtering mechanism that segregates the messages transmitted among heterogeneous applications and thus prevents the different applications from interrupting each other´s operations. This new software structure has been applied to manufacturing systems, and the effectiveness of the proposed technologies has been confirmed