CNC-C²: an ISO14649 and IEC61499 compliant controller

ABSTRACT

Manufacturing systems in the present industry must be flexible and allow fast reconfiguration to supply increasing demands for diversified products. Thus, a standard model for data exchange should be employed in a manner that the same data can be interpreted and used in different machines. In this work the ISO14649 (STEP-NC) standard is used to fulfil this requirement. Also, CNCs must be easily reprogrammable and able to reuse code for different tasks to reduce programming time. The contribution of this work is presenting a manufacturing system which is compliant to IEC 61499 and to STEP-NC, integrating them to fulfil requirements of interoperability and flexibility. A system, named CNC-C², was developed (Computerised Numeric Control Compliant to STEP-NC and Compliant to IEC61499) with several software tools and integrated them to a machining hardware, also developed and presented in this paper. Experiments were performed in a test workpiece including STEP-NC compliant drilling, planar facing, linear and circular cutting features while using IEC61499 Function Blocks networks to perform the computational task. CNC-C² achieved unprecedented interoperability and flexibility thanks to its compliance to Function Blocks and STEP-NC standards.

KEYWORDS:

• STEP-NC
• ISO14649
• IEC61499
• function blocks
• machining
• cnc
• manufacturing

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC/Brazil) where the research was carried out, to Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq/Brazil) for the scholarship of one of the research members and for partial support that made it possible to purchase part of the equipment. Thanks also to Mr. Dietmar Erich Bernhard Lilie (in memoriam) for donation of the initial mechanical structure that was modified to be our testbed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. In the present work, the only IEC 61499 Device contained within the System was the PC, since the other elements, such as the available low-level controllers, were not compliant with IEC 61499.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq/Brazil) and  Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC/Brazil)