An Object-Oriented Approach to an Agile Manufacturing Control System Design

Modern manufacturing control systems must respond quickly to continuous change in an agile manufacturing environment. With traditional manufacturing control system programming, it is time-consuming to make changes as a result of separate databases for the programmable logic controller (PLC), man–machine interface (MMI), and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) packages. To resolve this, an object-oriented model of the control system using the unified modelling language (UML) is proposed, which then provides control 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 decomposes the complex machine into smaller elements. Based on the virtual machine 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 code consistently derived from a single model.