Development of an open, event-based and platform independent architecture for distributed and intelligent control systems

New developments confirm the trend of autonomous distributed control systems in the field of manufacturing and automation. To fulfill this demand a new concept of the design of control systems is required in which the structure, the interfaces and communication and interaction opportunities with no restrictions to the platform or hardware are defined. The concept presented in this paper is based on hierarchical machine models, which represent the structure of the physical machine with all its sensors and actors, by objects in software. For this representation an object based model is used first in order to exploit the benefits of object oriented programming as a high sophisticated programming paradigm and second Io make the system structure more understandable and handling with machines easier. Furthermore a concept of standardized interfaces enables the adoption of different applications with the control system software even at the lowest stage. Therefore the existence of the typical control pyramid has no justification any longer