Alessandro Brusaferri

Applying the IEC-61499 Model to the Shoe Manufacturing Sector

This paper presents a new execution model and a concrete application of the IEC 61499 standard in the larger context of a currently running European project, which seeks to preserve shoe-manufacturing activities in Europe through the development of advanced production systems. The present work summarizes an analysis of current practices and research activities in the domain of the design of distributed control systems, and proposes an original design framework made of existing and ad-hoc developed tools, and based on the IEC 61499 standard. As this standard does not prescribe any execution model, we suggest an innovative solution for the implementation level of such distributed control systems. At the end, we present the design choices and some experience gained using the IEC 61499 standard for the design of the automation system of a real plant.

Model-Checking based Verification approach for advanced Industrial Automation solutions

Modern automation systems shall be able to conjugate increasing complexity of controlled processes with agile production reconfiguration requirements. In such a context, structured design approaches based on formal reference models as well as integrated verification and validation process, have to be adopted. To such an aim, present paper proposes an approach based on Model-Checking methods and tools oriented to the Verification of logic control systems in the field of Industrial Automation. In particular, graphical Stateflow based model deployment, Bounded Model Checking techniques and Model Coverage properties have been considered. Furthermore, the proposed approach have been applied regarding the development of the control solution for an automatic warehouse system integrated into a flexible shoes manufacturing plant.

Enabling agile manufacturing through reconfigurable control solutions

To cope with quick variation in product demand, modern automation systems shall be able to conjugate increasing complexity of controlled processes with agile reconfiguration of flexible manufacturing systems. To such an aim, structured approaches for reconfigurable system design, based on formal reference models, have to be provided. Mandatory condition for the adoption of such approaches is the identification of methodological guidelines, capable to proof their foundation and validity on real industrial application cases. In such a context, present paper describes main steps of a structured control system development approach - starting from UML based specification, integrating IEC 61499 based control design and closed-loop simulation based verification techniques - focusing a real industrial plant.

RI-MACS : an innovative approach for future automation systems

The European funded Radically Innovative Mechatronics and Advanced Control Systems (RI-MACS) research project was initiated to address some of the challenges in the future automation systems. Its mission is to bring the innovation offered by the Information Technology (IT) domain into the production life cycle, improving some of the existing inflexibilities in typical manufacturing automation plants. In this paper, some of the key aspects of automation systems engineering that require changes to ensure future competitiveness are highlighted. An overview of current approaches to automation are reviewed in relation to wired and wireless networking, automation architectures, and design environments.

Distributed Intelligent Automation Solutions for Self-adaptive Manufacturing Plants

Nowadays, a new generation of responsive factories is needed to face continuous changes in product demand and variety, and to manage complex and variant production processes. To such an aim, self-adaptive automation solutions are required, capable to adapt their control strategy in real-time to cope with planned as well as unforeseen product and process variations. In such a context, the present paper describes an automation solution based on a modular distributed approach for agile factory integration and reconfiguration, integrating a knowledge based cooperation policy providing self-adaptation to endogenous as well as exogenous events. The proposed approach is discussed through its application to a plant for customized shoe manufacturing.

CPS-based hierarchical and self-similar automation architecture for the control and verification of reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Fast evolving requirements for the manufacturing sectors, which must now take much more into account problems such as product customization, markets volatility and shortening life cycles, imposes to focus the attention of innovation towards a new generation of automation systems based on the CPS paradigm. The work here presented therefore suggest a new extension of the Cyber-Physical Systems functionalities through the definition of their Avatar, virtual counterpart of the physical system that, based on semantic, simulation and control models, enables a much more reconfigurable and performance optimizing self-similar and hierarchical automation architecture. Having identified the major research challenges to be tackled to create this vision, an intermediate step of implementation is presented, where state-of-the-art technologies have been adopted as partial enablers of the proposed CPS architecture and corresponding engineering tools. An industrial-level application serves as test-bed for the approach.

An integrated framework for Model-based Design and Verification of discrete automation solutions

The design process of advanced control solutions has become more and more challenging due to the increasing complexity of current automation systems. In such a context, structured design approaches based on formal reference models as well as reliable verification processes have to be adopted. In addition, in last years Model-based Design methods are being extensively adopted thanks to their capability to deal with the whole control system development process through model abstraction and independence from specific programming languages. The present paper proposes an integrated framework for Model-based Design and Verification of complex automation solutions based on innovative methods and tools. Furthermore an application example, regarding the development of the control solution for an automatic warehouse system, is addressed to highlight the benefits of the proposed framework.

RTAI-based execution environments for function block based control applications

The IEC 61499 standard has been recently adopted to promote a more flexible development process in the control and automation domain. The standard mainly deals with modeling issues leaving a lot of model execution details open. Different research groups are already working for the development of execution environments for the defined component model, proposing implementations with different execution semantics. This paper discuss the semantics of the execution environment and presents two execution environments, which although independently developed share a similar view of IEC61499 execution semantics and are both implemented over RTAI (real time application interface), a real-time Linux-based platform.

System-level performance of an automation solution based on industry standards

The flexibility and reconfigurability requirements of factories and manufacturing plants of the future can be partially met by adopting technologies and solutions already available for testing and experimentation. Openness and adherence to international standards are becoming increasingly important in modern distributed production and automation systems, especially when they have to cope with ever-increasing product differentiations and short product lifecycles. However, the increased flexibility and openness should not come to detriment of the system real-time characteristics. This paper deals with a pilot mechatronic architecture for agile transport systems, which has been specifically developed to enable the study of the aforementioned aspects in the framework of the “Factory of the Future” Italian flagship project. In particular, the paper focuses on possible bottlenecks and pitfalls at the operating system and communication levels, and provides preliminary indications on how to address or mitigate them by means of solutions already available on the market.

Integrated software platform for advanced design and optimization of industrial manufacturing control system

This contribution presents an innovative model for development and validation of automation systems for complex and large industrial plants. An integrated software platform has been developed in order to validate and test the final control application, reducing the errors made in the development phase, improving modularity and adaptability of the control and reducing time and cost for commissioning. Exploiting a modular control architecture for the plant supervisor allows implementation of optimization algorithms inside it. The usage of a DES simulator and the integration of a time-synchronization mechanism within the complete software and control architecture enable the validation of the intelligent supervisor using the simulation model as test bed before deploying it over the real industrial plant.