An object-oriented approach to an agile manufacturing control system design

Modem manufacturing control systems must respond quickly to continuous chan ge in an agile manufacturing environment. With traditional manufacturing co ntrol system programming, it is time-consuming to make changes as a result of separate databases for the programmable logic controller (PLC), man-mach ine interface (MMI), and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) p ackages. To resolve this, an object-oriented model of the control system us ing the unified modelling language (UML) is proposed, which then provides c ontrol and diagnostic code, enabling the network architecture, data mapping and control and diagnostic system to be designed within a single tool. The model is defined in accordance with the virtual machine concept which deco mposes the complex machine into smaller elements. Based on the virtual mach ine concept, the model consists of the conceptual (or normal perception for the system) and control view (the control perception of a control engineer ). A case study demonstrates the concept with both control and diagnostic c ode consistently derived from a single model.