DEVELOPMENT OF AN E-OPERATION FRAMEWORK FOR SOPC-BASED RECONFIGURABLE APPLICATIONS

In recent years, due to the progress of information and Internet technologies, reconfigurable manufacturing systems have attracted a lot of attention over the fields of reusable SIP (Silicon Intellectual Property) and remote maintenance. Motivated by the need of information sharing and reuse, this paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for e-operations with the capability of e-maintenance, e-commerce and e-reconfiguring. The Web Services technologies are exploited as the communication infrastructure, which conveniently integrates the processes of e-diagnostic, SIP transactions and remote reconfiguring. In addition, the proposed framework can also meet various security requirements, such as basic authentication and authorization, XML signature and authentication. In particular, to increase the overall efficiency for system development, UML (Unified Modeling Language) is used as the tool to accomplish the object-oriented analysis and design (OOA and OOD) of system components in the proposed e-operation framework. Finally, to validate the convenience and effectiveness of the proposed framework, a reconfigurable controller for a virtual AS/RS (Automatic Storage/Retrieval System) is constructed as an application paradigm. The integration test results show that the proposed development framework can certainly comply with the design objectives. It is believed that the developed technologies and concepts can be applied to constructing new-generation remote maintenance systems for the future industry automation.