A distributed, event-driven control architecture for flexibly automated manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new distributed real-time control architecture for flexibly automated production systems. The modelling assumptions underlying the design are driven by, and abstract, the structure and operations of the emerging 300 mm semiconductor manufacturing fab, one of the most extensively automated environments in contemporary manufacturing. The key element of the controller design itself, which differentiates it from past efforts, is the distribution of the control function to the constituent components of the system shop-floor architecture, while maintaining both the logical correctness and the efficiency of the system behaviour. The architecture was designed to be easily implementable in the actual system shop-floor, and therefore is aligned with, and augments, current practices in these environments. From a theoretical perspective, the proposed design has employed, integrated and extended a series of theoretical results from the field of Discrete Event Dynamical Systems. It is our expectation that the proposed architecture will also provide a formal framework for further analytical studies on the performance evaluation and performance-oriented control/scheduling of the considered class of manufacturing systems.

Modelling and simulation of an intelligent flexible manufacturing system via high-level object Petri nets (HLOPN)

“…Among them, coloured PN (Jensen 1994) and high-level PN (Genrich and Lautenbach 1981) are especially important for introducing abstract data structure and predicate operation to the PN to improve its modelling ability. Combining the advantages of OOP and PN methods to design a new object-oriented Petri net (OOPN) that may have the perfect features in both static and dynamic descriptions is also proposed (Battiston et al 1988, Lakos 1995 (Espeleta and Martinez 1992, Zimmermann and Hommel 1999, Park et al 2002 and OOPN methods (Lee and Park 1993, Wang 1996, Deng and Yang 1999, Chen and Lu 1997, Venkatesh and Zhou 1998, Zhou and Venkatech 1999. However, these methods cannot fully satisfy the requirement of a general job-shop FMS.…”

Processing flows of information

“…RFID-based inventory management performs continuous analysis of RFID readings to track valid paths of shipments and to capture irregularities [Wang and Liu 2005]. Manufacturing control systems often require anomalies to be detected and signalled by looking at the information that describe how the system behaves [Lin and Zhou 1999;Park et al 2002].…”

Integrated Production Attending to Supply Chain, Materials Handling and Storage Requirements

“…It is necessary to pay attention to its correct management due to the amount of expenses that can arise. To reduce these costs companies with production are changing to models in which storage and material-handling become part of the production process [14,15]. [9].…”