ScienceDirect IFAC-PapersOnLine 48-10 (2015) 081–086 ScienceDirect Available online at www.sciencedirect.com 2405-8963 © 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Peer review under responsibility of International Federation of Automatic Control. 10.1016/j.ifacol.2015.08.112 © 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Quality of Service, Reconfiguration, Middleware, Model Driven Design 1. INTRODUCTION In the last years, the automation and control systems have been required to become more complex, trustworthy and safe, to be able to support the technological changes given by the factory of the future concept. This concept has encouraged the industry to demand manufacturing systems which provide characteristics of reusability, modularity and flexibility. And, at the same time, making the manufacturing system intelligent, affordable, virtual, reliable, easy to adapt, operate and maintain (Factory of the Future, 2010). This means that the industry has started to integrate intelligent machinery components and architectures that helps in the automation, control and optimization of the processes, ensuring plant availability while providing high quality production with zero defects ( Factory of the Future, 2012). A mechanism to achieve some of the commented goals is to build the system with the ability of self-reconfiguration to meet QoS requirements. Reconfiguration provides the system with the ability, for instance, of switching from one configuration to another improving the efficiency of the system with respect to sudden changes on costumer demands and unpredictable events, like failures or disruptions. Different works can be found in the literature dealing with reconfiguration in manufacturing system. Some of these works have implemented reconfiguration mechanisms in the area of production re-scheduling. (Anosike et al., 2009) uses the information related with the work load of the different machines, the time it takes for an operation to finish, and the route it needs to travel, to optimize the route and the machines to be used for every product. Another example is the work of (Morenas et al., 2012) which assign priorities to products in order to conclude which one needs to be finished earlier. This priority is based on the client, the deadline and the order of the arrival. However, the reconfiguration of manufacturing system is not limited to production re-scheduling. There are other works that deal with the reconfiguration of the control system. (Lepuschitz et al., 2011) provides the reconfiguration of a control system based on IEC 61499 standard that is able to add, remove and reconnect functional blocks (FBs) in order to reconfigure the controller. In this same area (Yan et al., 2013; Schimmel et al., 2011) also perform reconfiguration of IEC 61499 controllers, by shifting the functionality of a FB from one controller into other. This is done by restoring not only the code but also the state of the FB (this is known as stateful reconfiguration). Another example of a stateful reconfiguration based on C programming is presented in (Merz et al., 2012). All these works deal with problems related to availability and software updates. In general, they offer a custom solution to concrete issues. The main purpose of this work is to provide generic mechanisms to support reconfiguration based on different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The incorporation of reconfiguration mechanisms into manufacturing systems has increased their complexity in terms of distribution, size and functionality. As a result, the design and development processes have also become more complex. In the last years, the use of model driven development (MDD) has been proposed to guide and help the engineers in the design and development of complex systems *Dept. Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática. ETSI Bilbao, UPV/EHU Spain (e-mail: rafael.priego, marga.marcos@ehu.eus) +IK4-Ikerlan, Arrasate, Spain (email: aagirre@ikerlan.es) **Dept. Ingeniería Electrónica y Automática EPS de Jaén Spain (e-mail: eestevez@ujaen.es) Abstract: Current automation systems demand flexibility and efficiency in order to face the constant changes of the application in terms of dynamism, complexity and extensibility. To deal with these demanded requirements, automation systems have been provided with reconfiguration techniques that have allowed them to reschedule the production, to recover from a faulty situation and to update the controller at run time, among others. This paper presents a middleware architecture which provides the automation systems with the necessary mechanisms to monitor and manage several types of QoS requirements that must be assured during system operation. The design of the middleware is based on a meta-model of the automation system, composed by a set of mechatronic components containing the information related to the hardware platform, the software they implement and their internal state that allows the middleware to take decisions in order to perform the different types of reconfiguration. R.Priego*, A. Agirre+, E. Estévez**, D. Orive*, M. Marcos* Middleware-based Support for Reconfigurable Mechatronic Systems