We urgently need to develop the next generation of automotive
technology to support energy conservation and the global
environment. For this we need an advancement of the Laboratory
Automation System (LAS). However, restructuring the hardware and
software of the LAS requires enormous amounts of time and
costs.
To solve the problems of the LAS development, we formed a
user-vendor working group, which then established the common rules
of LAS and IMACS (Integrated Measurement And Control System). IMACS
are software-centered rules, characterized by the stratification of
LAS and the interface called software parts.
So far, we have integrated IMACS into five engineering fields. A
total of 11 testing machine vendors participated in the
development. We manufactured about 350 software parts and made
their specifications openly available.
As the next step, we are collecting software parts by deleting
redundant functions. This requires comparison of the function of
the software parts and the standardization of the Operation and
Management Part.
For further development of IMACS we also studied the application
of IMACS to smaller systems.
We have thus far carried out activities related to the
development of IMACS as a Toyota Standard. In the future, we intend
to strengthen IMACS for possible thorough applications by
overcoming tasks including the standardization of Operation and
Management Parts and the application of IMACS to small-scale
systems.