Order-Preserving Languages for the Supervisory Control of Automated Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are characterized by the processing of different product types on the same manufacturing systems. In particular, it is possible that the paths of different products type through an FMS overlap and different product types share the same production components such as machines.This paper develops a new modeling technique for the supervisory control of FMS in the framework of discrete event systems (DES). In particular, we consider the general case of an FMS, where different product types can share production components and production components can hold multiple products. We first point out that a suitable model for such production component needs to keep track of the product type and the order of products entering and leaving production components. Then, we develop a general method for algorithmically constructing the required order-preserving models. We further illustrate the practicability of the developed method by an application example.