The re-engineering and reconfiguration of manufacturing cell control systems and reuse of their components

Contemporary approaches to the design and construction of manufacturing systems often results in inflexible enterprises that cannot readily be sharply tuned to changing business goals. Manufacturing cells represent a typical domain in which the existence of hard, inflexible links between tasks and resources will result in suboptimal performance and an inability to cope with change. Hence this paper reports progress on the definition of a semi-generic meta model of manufacturing cell control systems which can be used in conjunction with (a) modelling tools and (b) computerized infrastructure technology to facilitate system re-engineering and reconfiguration and the reuse of cell components in different manufacturing cells. The meta model has been conceived, formalized and evaluated under laboratory conditions by utilizing systems modelling and integration tools, based on CIM-OSA, Petri nets, EXPRESS, STEP and CIM-BIOSYS infrastructural elements.