A Novel Architecture for the Executive-Level Control Systems for a Discrete Machinery Production

Abstract

This paper presents a novel architecture of the executive-level control system for management of the discrete machinery productions. It combines the use of a supervisory control and a data acquisition system, and the tasks of the execution system based on the use of virtual Forth-machine. The widely used solutions for modern manufacturing are based on interaction of the manufacturing execution system directly with the supervisory control and data acquisition system, but this is not suitable for a discrete machinery manufacture, because of complexity of its production process. In the proposed architecture the supervisory control and data acquisition system are used for the online state monitoring of the CNC-machines hardware, signal logging and fault prediction. The task execution system downloads the manufacturing task, designed as the Forth program, from the manufacturing execution system and uploads it into the virtual machine, which controls the sequence of operations during one manufacturing task. Besides, the task execution system includes information exchange module, which ensures a software abstraction layer between the virtual machine and the hardware. The proposed architecture allows us to combine in one manufacturing process operations with a different degree of automation, and ensures replacement ofthe manual processes with automated ones without changing the manufacturing tasks documentation. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture is implementable, which determines the relevance of the further development in this direction.