Modular automatic generation of automation software for manufacturing machines

Day by day, producers of manufacturing systems are challenged with the need of flexibility and reconfigurability of their products. Being able of rapidly provide various configurations of products in response to customers requests is an important asset in the nowadays competition. Nevertheless, most of the automation software for special machines is built in a monolithic way which does not support rapid reconfigurability to reflect hardware modifications. This paper proposes a modular and reconfigurable approach to software development for the automation to support rapid reconfigurations of the software. The designed strategy consists in a seamless replication of the hardware modularization within the software to allow software generation by assembling pre-built pieces of software. The approach is presented and then applied to a real manufacturing machine.