A KnowledgeBased RealTime Diagnostic System for PLC Controlled Manufacturing Systems.pdfVIP

A Knowledge-Based Real-Time Diagnostic System for PLC Controlled Manufacturing Systems W. Hu*, M. Schroeder* A.G. Starr** *Department of Computing, City University London, London, EC1V 0HB, UK E-mail: w.hu@cs.city.ac.uk, msch@cs.city.ac.uk **School of Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK E-mail: a.g.starr@man.ac.uk ABSTRACT with a sacrifice of time. However, this kind of diagnosis process has been found with the following bottlenecks [3]: This paper presents an approach to a knowledge-based real-time • The PLC programming devices do not support automatic diagnostic system for PLC controlled manufacturing systems. A analysis of the logic circuits, which could help in finding general structure of the diagnostic system is implemented, which the most likely causes of the fault. is the extension of an existing diagnostic system we developed in • Most PLC code is graphically presented by function block recent years. Diagnostic knowledge is acquired artificially and diagrams or ladder logic. It is difficult to read and by model-based methods from the pneumatic and hydraulic functionality of complex programs is hard to recover. circuit diagrams and the PLC program. The knowledge is