A Generic Control System for Transparent Legacy System Migration

Abstract

Of importance in defining a balanced automation system (BAS) is product quality. Providing the best possible product quality is paramount for any 5MB to compete in the global marlretplace. To be able to obtain the required product quality, the quality verification should not be left to a human operator solely. Instead, the operator should be backed up by automatic supervision. This article presents a generic control system whose main activities are to initiate and supervise production. It is illustrated that, part from the main activities, the control system is also capable of providing automated veriftcation of the product quality. Furthermore, as the control system is designed in a modular fashion, it can be used when moving from one BAS to another while the control system is hardly affected, i.e. a transparent legacy system migration.