Reconfigurable control of robotized manufacturing cells

This paper investigates the field of manufacturing system control. The addressed subject is indeed very fascinating, due to the importance that it has reached in the last decades both at research and industrial level. On the other hand, it seems to the author that most of the complexity intrinsic to the subject itself relies on the different meanings or levels of abstraction that both the terms "manufacturing system" and "control" may symbolize. The presented research aims to face the topic in a concrete fashion, i.e., by developing a control software system for a specific, although easy to be generalized, robotized manufacturing cell. Two different development methodologies, from the conceptual design to the actual implementation, of a cell control system are presented and compared. The former, based on ladder logic diagrams, for a PLC controlled manufacturing cell; the latter, based on object-oriented modeling and programming techniques, for a PC controlled manufacturing cell. The analysis has been conducted considering the internal and external requirements of the manufacturing system, mostly driven by the contemporary industrial need of reconfigurable control systems, largely acknowledged as the critical key to succeed in the new era of mass customization. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.