A 'Controls Workflow Management' HMI To Configure and Maintain An Event Based Control System

The next generation of factory control systems will consist of a conglomeration of hardware and software resources that must work together to achieve factory-wide targets of throughput, quality and reconfigurablity. The University of Michigan's Engineering Research Center has developed a control system that extends reconfigurable software event-based control by considering a manufacturing system as a set of decentralized resources of both hardware and software instead of separate solutions for hardware/logic and software control. This software control system utilizes the event-condition-action (ECA) paradigm to realize event based control, with workflow "rules" stored in a relational database. We facilitate the control workflow management through a graphical front end tool that uses simple forms and a flowchart-like display to represent complex rules. It allows a user with little technical know-how to view, create and maintain control rules of the software system. This graphical tool operates independently of the system being controlled, by manipulating the workflow rules in the database; thereby enabling control strategies to be updated in real time