Objective
In the current state of the art, the discipline of distributed manufacturing system design is strongly dependent on the technology of communication networks used in the system. The dependence is so strong that, in many cases, the details of the communication sub-system employed to federate the embedding system migrate into the user application software. This feature forces the application provider to re-design and re-implement its software packages every time he decides to change the communication sub-system. This very inopportune situation is caused by the use of communication platforms issued from different origins.
The reason for co-existence of heterogeneous standards in distributed manufacturing systems is historical, technical and economical. The part of turnover directly dependent on communication products for some large control system providers and field device vendors is too important to let them abandon the solution which they adopted and brought to the market. This reason is hardly acceptable for an application provider for whom the inescapable software tunings caused by this situation void some part of benefits.
In order to reinstate the lost comfort of application provider, the RACKS Contractors propose to follow strategies adopted during the last decade by the producers of computer platforms (PCs, workstations). In this currently stable sector, every manufacturer has its own implementation of a standardised operating system. It is impossible to impose the structure of entire platform and only its interface can be standardised. Application providers are free from exploring the details embedded within the platform architecture and should only be aware of the interface.
The ambition of the RACKs project is to follow the example of computer providers transposed into the domain of field bus communication equipment. With the common interface to a set of chosen communication standards, the applications programs can be developed for a wider range of system architectures and the final choice of communication system will be guided only by performance and by economical criteria. The current status of the market shows that the industrial actors are willing to converge towards a common field bus standard. The solution which is technically optimal but improbable for political reasons would consist in adopting of a unique world-wide accepted standard federating the advantages of all existing proprietary solutions. It is evident that this revolutionary outcome does not have any chance to emerge in the nearest future.
The RACKS Contractors are strongly concerned with the situation in the world market of the field automation products and especially with the market of field bus based systems. They believe that the rational step towards improvement passes through the adoption of an evolutionary approach which consists in defining and implementing the user-level common interface to four chosen solutions which follow similar strategies. It is worth noting, that among these four solutions, three make part of the European Standard prEN50170. The definition of such an interface would tend to hide the details of the communication system from the application point of view.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences software software applications system software operating systems
- engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering electronic engineering control systems
- social sciences sociology industrial relations automation
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Coordinator
92300 LEVALLOIS-PERRET
France
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