Reuse of information as a base for development and verification of control programs for flexible manufacturing cells

Shortened product life-cycles decrease the output rate of manufacturing systems as the introduction of new products into the manufacturing system becomes more frequent. Improvements of the development process of manufacturing systems are needed to increase the output. Information handling and development of control programs based on information reuse are two of the most important improvement areas. These areas, among other things, can be a support for off-line verification, which promises to directly increase the output rate due to shortening product introduction times. This paper deals with two problems of the many connected to enabling offline verification. First, a general control program structure, adapted to information reuse, is needed and secondly, the information necessary to generate the control programs needs to be defined. A method is proposed where information from the mechanical design of a cell, from the product, and from manual simulation are reused and automatically converted into control programs that schedule the work in a collision-free, deadlock-free and time-optimized way. The correctness of the generated programs is guaranteed by use of formal methods, simulation and an uncorrupted conversion of specifications into control programs.