An Engineer's Workstation to Support Integrated Development of Flexible Production Control Systems

Today's manufacturing industry demands flexible and decentralized production control systems to avoid hours of down time of the production line in case of a failure of a single central production control computer or program. Additionally, today's market forces demand smaller lot sizes and a more flexible mixture of different products manufactured in parallel on one production line. These requirements increase the complexity of the control software. Consequently, sophisticated techniques for the development of such production systems are needed. In this paper we present an overview of our seamless methodology for integrated design, analysis, and validation for such production control systems. We illustrate our approach by an existing material flow system which is a major part of a real production system. We show how our modelling approach is used for simulation facilities, code generation for programmable logic controllers, and maintenance purposes.