Development Tools of an Adaptive Controller

Abstract

Manufacturing enterprise today crucially needs computer numerical control (CNC) to employ higher level input languages and reducing dependency on proprietary system. In traditional CNC system, most predefined numerical control (NC) commands programmed at early stage were often found to be unsuitable or sometimes unusable especially when the machining process was interrupted by unscheduled event. This will result in additional effort spent for advance process planning and NC code generation. Moreover, readjustment of the program consumes time and requires high skills. To address this issue, considerable efforts are being undertaken to improve CNC system by replacing traditional CNC to a next generation of intelligent CNC. This paper proposes a framework for adaptive controller of an open CNC system by merging established STEP-NC and IEC 61499 standards. This project applies STEP-NC as data input program; taking advantages offered by both standards. IEC 61499 is a layered architecture function that simplifies controller design and enhances the controller performance. As a result, both decision making and control activities are embedded inside the controller architecture whereby optimal machining parameters are issued automatically based on available online machine resources. Hence, a tool-path will be generated just-in-time by the CNC controller. The generated tool path can be directly used to drive the open architecture machine tool without any intermediate.