Distributing Sequential Control for Manufacturing Automation Systems

Recent trends in manufacturing require the use of reconfigurable equipment that facilitates rapid and cost-effective change of functionality through modular design, which supports fast integration. Intelligent devices (e.g., sensors, actuators) with integrated computation and communication capabilities enable high-level modularity, not only with the respect to hardware components but also in terms of control functionality; this can be achieved by distributing control to different network-connected devices. Thus, to enable fast and reliable system reconfigurations, in this brief, we introduce a method for distribution of control tasks and generation of control code for the devices in the control network. Our approach is based on the control interpreted Petri nets (CIPNs) formalism. We start from a CIPN capturing the centralized (overall) control system, and the mapping of input and output signals to local controllers (LCs) (i.e., smart devices) that have direct physical access to system sensors and actuators. From these, our method automatically designs distributed control tasks for LCs in the network, as well as generates control code for each LC. The applicability of the proposed method is experimentally verified on two real-world case studies.