Requirements Engineering of Automated Manufacturing Plants

- in the application area of Flexible Manufacturing Systems -

Fields of Research

The development of automated manufacturing plants is strongly affected by the continously increasing complexity and automation level of manufacturing plants (see picture below), the shortening of innovation cycles, and world wide competition between producers. In order to remain competitive in the long term it is necessary to make use of potential enhancements in the company as far as possible. One of the major jobs in this context is the optimal design of the development process.

Trend of cost proportion between the subsystems of manufacturing plants (see [Schelberg94])

The current practice in planning and implementation of manufacturing plants does not sufficiently take the trend shown above into account. In particular the integrated planning of mechanics, electr(on)ics, and software is a common deficit. Among other things this manifests itself in the late involvement of software developers and the insufficient cooperation between developers from different disciplines.

Therefore we aim at the development of a method for interdisciplinary gathering and formalized documentation of requirements for manufacturing plants, that can serve as a basis for time parallel development. We deal especially with the difficulties of coordination with customer needs and component-oriented development. Our current focus are solutions for Flexible Manufacturing Systems.

[Schelberg94] H.-J. Schelberg, Objektorientierte Projektierung von SPS-Software, Technical Report of the wbk, Volume 57, 1994

Contact persons:

Gunnar Billing and Robert Sandner

Gunnar Billing, 02.03.98