An Agile methodology for Manufacturing Control Systems development

Robotized manufacturing cells are required more and more often to process high variety of short life-cycle product. This increases the need for methods and techniques for easy reconfiguration of software programs running in Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), i.e., devices able to control manufacturing systems. PLCs run embedded code characterized by a procedural nature that does not make it quite reconfigurable. In this paper we propose an AGIle COntrol System Development (AGICOSD) methodology that uses various practices of Agile software development methodologies and the Design By Contract (DBC) practice for modeling and programming manufacturing control systems. In this context we propose a way to automatically generate IEC 61131-3 conformed instruction list code starting from object oriented code and contracts written in Java Modeling Language. A test-bed and some industrial trials have shown the effectiveness of our methodology with respect to the traditional development methodology in terms of fast reconfigurability of manufacturing systems, reusability of instruction list code and reliable translation of java code to IEC 61131-3 standard compliant code.