DISTRIBUTED ENGINEERING OF MODULAR RECONFIGURABLE AUTOMATION SYSTEMS

摘要

Research conducted by the MSI Research Institute, Loughborough University, into the development of concepts and tools to support the global engineering of component-based reconfigurable manufacturing automation systems in the automotive production domain is described in this paper. The concept of a collaborative framework to coordinate the various engineering activities of globally distributed engineering teams in the design, implementation, operation and diagnosis of production machinery is proposed. Details of the runtime system, monitoring and visualisation capabilities are provided along with a brief description of an industrially focused implementation of the framework for use within the automation domain.