Reconfiguration architecture for updates of automation systems during operation

In recent years automation systems have been required to provide characteristics of flexibility and efficiency in order to cope with the fast changes of the market and consumer demands. To deal with these requirements, the industry has started to implement reconfiguration techniques in order to allow the automation system to reschedule the production, recover from faulty situations and to update the controller at run time, among others. Previous works of authors have been aimed at a model-based definition of the plant components and operations, related to a product. Additionally, automatic code generation has been proposed to obtain an optimal control sequence. This paper extends these previous works with an architecture that generates and updates the software architecture of a Programmable Logic Controller during runtime, in response to changes on the plant layout, the product to be manufactured or the control hardware.