Standard based framework for the development of manufacturing control systems

摘要

A Manufacturing Control Systems CASE tool, called MCSTOOLS, has been developed with the aimof reducing the effort needed to produce this kind of software. The control systems developed bymeans of this tool follow the Control Systems for Integrated Manufacturing (COSIMA conceptualmodel (ESPRIT 477 project). In order to minimize the development time of Manufacturing ControlSystems (MCS), this CASE tool automatically generates as much software as possible. In addition,the software produced by the MCSTOOLS is highly reusable, as it conforms to a widely acceptedsoftware engineering method-Object Oriented Analysis/Design/Programming (OOA/D/P and severalmanufacturing and communications standards. Among these standards the most relevant are;Product Data Representation and Exchange (also known as STEP, ISO 10303), ManufacturingMessage Specification (MMS, ISO 9506) and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture(CORBA). In order to achieve the objective of producing MCSs able to be adapted to a wide range ofmanufacturing environments, several techniques have been incorporated into the software generatedby the CASE tool. The most important of these techniques are: object oriented distributed computing,object oriented multithreading computing and object persistence. In addition, the software producedincludes a Coloured Petri Net based state control module and a generic user interface written in Java.The MCS CASE tool developed can be used in different ways depending on the number of newsystem elements to be controlled and the complexity of this system. So in some situations it is possibleto generate the control software automatically without manual assistance by using the graphical userinterface of MCSTOOLS. In other cases it is also necessary to modify or to develop software usinghigh level directives and macro language constructs included in the CASE tool. Whereas for theremainder of cases, as for other systems, it is necessary to modify or develop C++ software. Whenneeded new source code is developed out of a skeleton generated by the CASE tool.