A SHOP-FLOOR CONTROLLER CLASS FOR COMPUTER-INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) has not yet provided the expected benefits for small-to-medium volume discrete parts manufacturing operations. Typically, these systems come in over budget and yet do not provide the promised flexibility. This can be directly attributed to the high cost of control software development for integrated systems. Reusable software has been proposed as a solution to the high software development and maintenance costs. One paradigm for reusable software, object-oriented modeling and programming, has emerged as an important method for specifying, creating, and reusing software modules. This paper describes an object-oriented approach to specifying and developing shop floor controllers for automated manufacturing environments. Specifically, a shop floor controller class hierarchy has been developed based on the behaviour of specific shop floor equipment and is described in this paper. User experience has shown that software development time can be significantly reduced through the use of this controller class.