Automatic generation of field control strategies for supporting (re-)engineering of manufacturing systems

Motivated by the huge effort for adapting discrete field level automation software in case of (even minor) modifications of the technical system, this paper presents an approach to support the engineering and re-engineering of open-loop control software. In contrast to implement what a plant has to do, we suggest a novel modelling approach which enables describing what a plant is able to do. Based on an extension of the Unified Modelling Language meta model, an object-oriented approach for describing a manufacturing system's state space in a consolidated way is proposed. The strict, declarative semantics of ontologies is utilized to automatically reason about this model for determining the manufacturing system's state space and deriving an optimal operation sequence to be implemented.