Sangregorio P., A.L. Cologni, F. Previdi
Day by day, producers of manufacturing systems
are challenged with the need of flexibility and reconfigurability
of their products. Being able of rapidly provide various configurations of products in response to customers requests is an
important asset in the nowadays competition. Nevertheless, most
of the automation software for special machines is built in a
monolithic way which does not support rapid reconfigurability to
reflect hardware modifications. This paper proposes a modular
and reconfigurable approach to software development for the
automation to support rapid reconfigurations of the software.
The designed strategy consists in a seamless replication of the
hardware modularization within the software to allow software
generation by assembling pre-built pieces of software. The
approach is presented and then applied to a real manufacturing
machine.
