Open-architecture system based on a reconfigurable hardware-software multi-agent platform for CNC machines

New generation of manufacturing systems endows their intelligence and reconfigurability to the computerized numerical controller (CNC) machines. This paper presents an open-architecture platform based on multi-agent hardware-software units, by developing a novel Multi-Agent Distributed CONtroller (MAD-CON) system. This system intends to fulfill the requirements of reconfigurability for the next generation of intelligent machines. The design of intelligent drives for this system follows a hardware-software co-design approach using a simple and intuitive structure. The hardware units of the proposed system integrate control and monitoring functions providing an FPGA-based open architecture for reconfigurable applications. On the other hand, software components were developed utilizing the XML structure for system description files, gathering features like a flowchart descriptive language and a graphic user-interface. MADCON was applied to a retrofitted to CNC lathe for control and monitoring in order to validate the proposed architecture towards the development of new generation intelligent manufacturing systems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.