Developing manufacturing control software: A survey and critique

Abstract

Abstract. The complexity and diversity of manufacturing software and the need to adapt this software to the frequent changes in the production requirements necessitate the use of a systematic approach to developing this software. The software life-cycle model (Royce, 1970) that consists of specifying the requirements of a software system, designing, implementing, testing, and evolving this software can be followed when developing large portions of manufacturing software. However, the presence of hardware devices in these systems and the high costs of acquiring and operating hardware devices further complicate the manufacturing software development process and require that the functionality of this software be extended to incorporate simulation and prototyping. This paper reviews recent methods for planning, scheduling, simulating, and monitoring the operation of manufacturing systems. A synopsis of the approaches to designing and implementing the real-time control software of these systems is presented. It is concluded that current methodologies support, in a very restricted sense, these planning, scheduling, and monitoring activities, and that enhanced performance can be achieved via an integrated approach.

A correct and scalable deadlock avoidance policy for flexible manufacturing systems

“…The resulting admissible region does not satisfy (2), and, therefore, the policy is not correct. Reference [20] provides a formal framework for proving DAP correctness.…”

“…5 we have Intuitively, if a part stage is categorized as right, all preceding part stages in the route must also be categorized as right (similarly for left). In general, these constraints are expressed as for (2) Finally, note that 1 if and 1 if…”

“…Automatic control software development is, therefore, an important area of manufacturing systems research. Good surveys of this research area are found in [2] and [3]. A common theme is that the control function can be formally modeled, typically with Petri nets, while control executables can be automatically generated from these models [4], [5].…”

Real-time software methodologies: Are they suitable for developing Manufacturing control software?

“…Some of the extensions that enhance the modeling power of place-transition nets are also introduced. These Petri nets, as implied in a companion paper (Chaar, Teichroew and Volz 1993), are extensively used in developing manufacturing control software.…”

A software environment for flexible manufacturing system control software testing

“…A modular manufacturing language called M 2 L for the design of FMS control software was reported in reference [13]. A comprehensive overview of manufacturing control software systems was given in reference [14]. From the viewpoint of manufacturing engineering, these studies focused on the architectures, theories and implementation methodologies of FMS control software [15± 20], whereas the assurance of quality of FMS control software has yet to be studied.…”