An Integrated Distributed Software System for Reconfigurable Manufacturing

Software continues to play an ever-increasing role throughout manufacturing systems, in many cases as the prime contributor to Overall Factory Effectiveness (OFE), as well as system reliability, capability, operational cost and ramp-up and reconfiguration cost. The integration of information technology in manufacturing is one of the most important drivers for productivity growth in the manufacturing sector today. Researchers in the University of Michigan’s Engineering Research Center (ERC) have undertaken an ambitious project to implement a distributed Reconfigurable Factory Testbed (RFT). The distributed RFT is a comprehensive platform that enables research, development, education, validation and transfer of Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) concepts. The RFT consists of both real and virtual machines controlled over a communication network and coordinated through a unified software architecture. The RFT is conceived to be extensible so as to allow the modular incorporation and integration of additional components (hardware and/or software, real and/or virtual). The RFT contains a software platform that provides a software architecture and methodology to connect all of the pieces of the RFT, allowing for rapid prototyping, integration, complementary utilization of software components, and transfer of newly-developed software solutions. The software infrastructure has a data-centric architecture and supports multi-component solutions. It has also the ability for reconfigurability of control and diagnostic software during run-time. The software components are configured and utilized as resources where control rules in the database define the configuration. In this paper, we discuss this resource-based approach to building an integrated distributed software system for reconfigurable manufacturing.