Model-driven migration of supervisory machine control architectures

Supervisory machine control is the high-level control in advanced manufacturing machines that is responsible for the coordination of manufacturing activities. Traditionally, the design of such control systems is based on finite state machines. An alternative, more flexible approach is based on task-resource models. This paper describes an approach for the migration of supervisory machine control architectures towards this alternative approach. We propose a generic migration approach based on model transformations that includes normalisation of legacy architectures before their actual transformation. To this end, we identify a number of key concerns for supervisory machine control and a corresponding normalised design idiom. As such, our migration approach constitutes a series of model transformations, for which we define transformation rules. We illustrate the applicability of this model-driven approach by migrating (part of) the supervisory control architecture of an advanced manufacturing machine: a wafer scanner developed by ASML. This migration, towards a product-line architecture, includes a change in architectural paradigm from finite state machines to task-resource systems. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.