Component-based Control Software Design for Flexible Manufacturing System

A new method that designs and implements the component-based distributed & hierarchical flexible manufacturing control software is described with a component concept in this paper. The proposed method takes aim at improving the flexibility and reliability of the control system. On the basis of describing the concepts of component-based software and the distributed object technology, the architecture of the component-based software of the control system is suggested with the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). And then, we propose a design method for component-based distributed & hierarchical flexible manufacturing control system. Finally, to verify the software design method, a prototype flexible manufacturing control system software has been implemented in Orbix 2. 3c, VC++6.0 and has been tested in connection with the physical flexible ranufacturing shop at the WuXi Professional Institute.