OPERATION MODES HANDLING IN DISTRIBUTED AUTOMATION SYSTEMS

Operation mode handling is one of the important tasks in automation systems. Guidelines for the definition and handling of operation modes are currently provided by academicians and related organizations focusing on centralized systems. In distributed automation systems, such guidelines are seldom dealt with. Therefore, operation mode guidance compatible with the distributed application idea is proposed in this paper. Some modes such as automatic (including setup/starting-up, normal production, hold, stop, tolerance error handling and abort), semi-automatic, manual, emergency stop and idle are considered for managing the operation. The modeling using UML state machine is presented to describe the behavior of modes and their internal states. An implementation based on a task scheduling approach is presented as an example for the application of the developed strategies.