PARCS: a parallel/distributed implementation environment for control software execution

At the present time, one of the main problems in implementing flexible manufacturing industries is the development of the control systems. Part of the problems are assigned to high control software development and maintenance costs. The majority of the difficulties in developing software for control systems are due to the lack of a model which is proper to deal with this kind of system. For instance, models which are being used to develop control systems are based on hierarchical approaches which are sequential and centralized. This paper presents PARCS (PARallel/distributed model for Control Software development), defines the operations used to express the parallelism of control system components, and shows an implementation environment to support the control.