An object-oriented manufacturing control system

This paper presents the development of an event-driven control architecture and its implementation in a physical simulator of a computerized manufacturing system using object-oriented techniques. The architecture was developed to improve the efficiency of handling concurrent control events in the DOS environment. In the implementation, the control system of the physical simulator consists of four distinct layers of control devices: a PC/386 computer, a microcontroller, I/O modules and the system's control devices such as motors, solenoids and sensors. A control program residing in the PC/386 coordinates system-level tasks such as event scheduling, while a BASIC program running on the microcontroller handles all low-level control tasks such as sensor monitoring and motion control. The concepts and developments presented in this paper should help in implementing an efficient control system for both CIM systems and their physical simulators.