A Model for the Execution of Task Level Specifications
for Intelligent and Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Peter Loborg, Per Holmbom*, Martin Sköld and Anders Törne

Dept. of Computer and Information Science
*Dept. of Physics and Measurement Technology
Linköping University, Sweden


ABSTRACT

We introduce here a software architecture for the control of a sensor based manufacturing system consisting of a number of machines and peripheral equipment. The architecture divides the programming effort into two levels, task level programming and control level programming. The task level programming is based on the programming of a discrete model of the world, the World Model (WM). The WM provides a symbolic representation of the world state and isolates the task programs from the control level algorithms. Programming the control level amounts to modelling the manufacturing equipment as components with `behaviour' using object oriented techniques. Each component specifies how it should react to changes in the WM, i.e. selection and specification of the control algorithms to be executed. Programming at both levels can be done incrementally and control algorithms may be changed dynamically in the real-time kernel.

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Peter Loborg <petlo@ida.liu.se>