Abstract:
Industry 4.0 depicts a vision of intelligent and agile production manufacturing processes that can achieve product customisation rapidly and economically. It encourages the manufacturing systems to comprise a group of interconnected and configurable subsystems rather than a unitary product line with fixed procedures. These agile production systems further require an agile design and deployment methodology that has dramatically facilitated the prosper of software applications. Different from traditional software development, the scope of industrial system design ranges from programming languages that focus on system-level behaviours to execution platforms and physical plant manufacturing. These form an extensive design exploration space for agile system development. This thesis starts with an example of an intelligent Sorter System and leverages SystemGALS, a system-level programming language, to design its control system. In addition, we employ Chipyard, an agile RISC-V SoC framework, to build two execution platforms for the control programs. The main contribution of our research can be summarised in three folds. The first one is to evaluate the pros and cons of current tools for industrial control system design by implementing a smart Sorter System. Secondly, we demonstrate a software and hardware co-design example in SystemGALS. The last one is to present a new potential execution framework for SystemGALS programs that will allow the design of hardware/software customised controllers, including both software/runtime systems and hardware parts of the final design.