Standard based framework for the development of manufacturing control systems

A Manufacturing Control Systems CASE tool, called MCSTOOLS, has been developed with the aim of reducing the effort needed to produce this kind of software. The control systems developed by means of this tool follow the Control Systems for Integrated Manufacturing (COSIMA conceptual model (ESPRIT 477 project). In order to minimize the development time of Manufacturing Control Systems (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 accepted software engineering method-Object Oriented Analysis/Design/Programming (OOA/D/P-and several manufacturing and communications standards. Among these standards the most relevant are; Product Data Representation and Exchange (also known as STEP, ISO 10303), Manufacturing Message 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 of manufacturing environments, several techniques have been incorporated into the software generated by 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 produced includes 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 new system elements to be controlled and the complexity of this system. So in some situations it is possible to generate the control software automatically without manual assistance by using the graphical user interface of MCSTOOLS. In other cases it is also necessary to modify or to develop software using high level directives and macro language constructs included in the CASE tool. Whereas for the remainder of cases, as for other systems, it is necessary to modify or develop C++ software. When needed, new source code is developed out of a skeleton generated by the CASE tool.