Preventive Maintenance Manager design pattern for component based machine tools

Control applications are continuously growing in complexity due to the inclusion of new functionalities and services, which demand increasing the semantic of design elements. This sounds familiar to software engineers, who have already walked that road. Design patterns are one of the techniques they have commonly used to leverage their design semantics, considering them as reusable "trusted solutions to common problems". Under that spirit, one specific design pattern is presented, that gives a generic approach to preventive maintenance issues, a common topic in most control applications. This pattern is described by means of extended Function Blocks (FBs with added semantic artifacts), middleware services and the description of their coordinated behavior. As a case study, this pattern is used in the design of a glass cutting machine tool.