Developments in dynamic and intelligent reconfiguration of industrial automation

This paper provides an overview of current techniques to allow the industrial systems to automatically adapt to change while maintaining predictable and stable system behaviour. This is performed along the dimensions of simple, dynamic and intelligent reconfiguration and focuses on the physical device and software component levels of the shop floor and in particular, on automatic reconfiguration of programmable logic controller systems. Through an analysis of recent work by the authors and others in this area, the paper identifies the basic requirements for intelligent reconfiguration and the outstanding issues in this area.