Integrated methodologies of software development and remote maintenance for semi-automated machines

Day after day, vendors of manufacturing machineries are challenged with the need of flexibility and reconfigurability of their products. Be able to rapidly provide various variants and configurations of the products in response to customers requests is an important asset for every company in the nowadays competition. Nevertheless, most of the automation software for special machines is still built in a monolithic way which does not support rapid reconfigurability to reflect hardware modifications. And once the machine is delivered to the customer site, the maintenance process begins. Maintenance costs are increasing with the globalized market due to travel costs for sending service personnel to the customer plants. In some cases, the issue would have been easily solved if only the technichian had been able to be on the site. This makes remote diagnosis, debugging and repair an obvious advantage. This thesis presents two approaches to solve the aforementioned issues. A modular and reconfigurable approach to software development for the automation to support rapid reconfigurations of the software, and a remote maintenance methodology that uses wireless and mobile technology to record and transmit video and machine operational parameters together for remote viewing and analysis.