Intelligent Actuation and Measurement System-Based Modelling: a Case Study

This work is aimed at experimentation of the Intelligent Actuation and Measurement (IAM) Model developed by the PRIAM (prenormative requirements for IAM) project for the specification of a manufacturing plant. In order to do this a manufacturing enterprise made available a whole production system composed of multiple working stations interconnected by means of a proprietary field network. The plant referenced for this work includes conveyors controlled by PLCs, intelligent sensors and actuators, cartesian robots, specific processing units devoted to cell control functions and a supervisor unit. The day to day management and maintenance procedures were also made available in order to process a complete specification according to the IAM approach. This paper shows that, so that it was possible to save the general aspects of the main control, for maintenance and management functions which are more or less similar in most of production systems, the specification phase must be completely independent of all implementations. The approach presented here also takes into account the technological constraints required to ensure that the right choices are made when the specified system functions have to be distributed inside the automation system and down to the various field devices.