Automated product assembly systems are traditionally designed with the intent that they will be operated with few significant changes for as long as the product is being manufactured. This approach to factory design and programming has many undesirable qualities which have motivated the development of more “flexible” systems. In an effort to improve agility, different types of flexibility have ...

The Function Block (FB) model was first standardized by the 1131 standard of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for programmable controllers. This standard was successfully adopted by the industry but it seems to have several constraints for the development of today’s complex embedded control and automation systems. These constraints are mainly imposed by the procedural program...

In the face of a future rise in energy prices, energy-efficient operation of industrial automation systems has strategic impact for manufacturing companies. The reduction of energy demand during unproductive phases helps to contribute to the overall energy efficiency of automated production systems. Up to now, there is no general scientific concept which addresses energy-efficient operation of ...

The implementation of quality assurance practices has a cost-benefit hard to balance. This is because the cost of implementing the practices is direct, whereas, the benefit obtained is indirect. In order to improve the cost-benefit of this practices, this work present a support system for quality assurance inspection able to automate the scope definition and non-compliance assignment, besides t...

In industry, the traditional factory acceptance test (FAT) of process automation (PA) software is being replaced by virtual commissioning (VC). In this paper VC is introduced in drinking water treatment. A quantitative measure has been defined to compare the shortenings of time-to-market of projects tested with VC and FAT, while taking into account the size and complexity of the software. The m...

Web service composition can provide a value-chain between customers and suppliers. The increasing number of services, and thus possible combinations, demands the development of dynamic and automatic techniques for their composition. Current commercial solutions are limited and are primarily static and manual. Automation requires reasoning about (semantic descriptions of) the services. In this p...