Evaluating a flexible architecture for distributed control

Along production pipelines in manufacturing industries, several elaboration phases in which the movement of interpolated axes are present. These activities have to be synchronized with several other simpler activities along the pipeline. Computerized numerical controls for such systems have to be flexible and strongly expandable and reusable since pipelines are frequently reconfigured to realize differently arranged pipelines with different technical requirements. The assessment of such a flexible architecture is presented, on the basis of which the building of flexible distributed controls for pipelines is possible. The architecture has been defined in the ESPRIT HPCN (High Performance Computer Networking) project MUPAAC (Multi Processor Architecture for Automatic Control). MUPAAC architecture and prototype has been assessed in order to identify the most important performance indexes.