A user-friendly control system to easy reconfigure a manufacturing cell

Generic manufacturing enterprises need to interact with an environment characterized by a strong competition. In order to react to the mutable requests of market, control systems should confer to the manufacturing system capabilities for easy modifiability, and this can be achieved by reducing the necessary time to reconfigure the existing system. Following this main requirement, this paper presents a user-friendly control system that pursues three operational goals: Ability to easy re-program the sequence of operations of the manufacturing equipments of a manufacturing cell; Reconfigurability of the system, by allowing to add/remove a new/existing component in/from the manufacturing cell. Real time supervisioning of the system, by the visualization of the currently executing operation and the state of each element of the cell. The proposed control system user-interface has been realized in Microsoft Visual Basic common programming language; by using such interface the operator can create the sequences of movements and operations of the elements without being acquainted with the different equipment control systems and their programming languages. The control system, realized in an object-oriented approach, allows the user to simply build up operation sequences by simply selecting step by step the specific manufacturing resource and the operation that the resource should execute. Every programmed operation will then be translated into the specific language of the controlled components which perform that operation. A case study shows how the proposed control system has been implemented in a real robotized manufacturing cell.