EMBench: An IEC61499 Based Integrated Environment for Manufacturing Systems

In these days, manufacturing organizations are facing global competition and short technological cycles. The flexibility of an enterprise and its ability to respond to miscellaneous customer requests decide the competitiveness in the global market. It also requires that the manufacturing plant must reorganize efficiently to produce various products at low cost and short time. This flexibility in the manufacturing process must be able to accommodate various tasks to share resources under safe and efficient control. In the current development processes of manufacturing systems, information handling usually is an undeveloped area. Domains such as design, validation, and deployment will be separated and isolated. One reason for the redundant non-value-added implementation of the component model is that existing system development largely consists of isolated sub-processes that generate proprietary information such as control logic, simulation models, etc. This paper focuses on introducing an innovative software environment, EMBench, which integrates mechanical design, control configuration, simulation and deployment services seamlessly for manufacturing automation systems. Its auto-generated user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) supports direct commanding to the controller at different layers, and internal data (control/mechanical) and model (simulation/physical) mapping eliminates redundant and error-prone manual data entry and model replication at different stages. This tool provides a means of layered and encapsulated services so that complex systems can be designed, configured, simulated and deployed hierarchically with various levels of details. IEC61499 is an emerging industrial standard for distributed industrial process measurement & control systems. Using IEC61499 function blocks and service layer architecture, control services ranging from basic joint servo, to kinematics of a mechanism, to trajectory interpolation, to language parsing and HMI processing, to complex multiple resources/processes coordination can be configured for an application. With the adaptation of IEC61499, EMBench serves as a modular, component-based design, simulation and prototyping tool for shop floor control. Several case studies are presented in details and various potential usages in different fields are discussed. EMBench uses IEC61499 as a means for modularization and reuse of control services.