Open control architecture for discrete manufacturing automation

This paper presents results of the European ESPRIT project 8823 DCC (discrete cell control), aimed to define the reference architecture of a cell controller, describing the required communication and information infrastructure, applications and engineering support. Based on this architecture, an engineering methodology and a set of supporting tools (called DCC-Core) have been developed and validated on two industrial target cells: a welding cell for ship components, and a production cell for printed circuit boards. ROBOTIKER as part of the DCC participated in the welding cell for ship components is described in derail. Two DCC-Core applications have been developed during the DCC project, the scheduling and the monitoring applications. With the DCC-Core system, engineers are able to easily and quickly develop their own cell controller, using the core applications based on the integrating infrastructure API.