With the increasing complexities, such as massive computing devices and strict requirements for collaboration, of industrial production systems, the concept of the cyber-physical production system (CPPS) is considered as a promising approach for addressing these challenges. However, programmability is a challenge in CPPSs. The traditional chimney style of programming requires considerable design effort from engineers to handle the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of cyber-physical model that encompasses computing, temporal, and geometric semantics along with physical dynamics. Thus, an easy-to-use programming model and an integrated programming framework that are suited to this context are required. However, the existing programming models typically fully consider only computing while only partially considering temporal characteristics, and they rarely consider geometric semantics. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel event-based programming model, GePro, considering the geometric spatial semantics to realize integrated programming and reduce design effort, especially the reconfiguration of adding new physical devices into the exist system. A prototype of GePro is implemented and verified based on IEC 61499 by the implementation of design and reconfigure assembly CPPS. The results show that using GePro results in a programming time savings of an development life cycle time compared to traditional models for reconfiguration.

This study is published in APPLIED SCIENCES-BASEL 10.21(2020):1-16.