AUTOMATIC-DETERMINATION OF OPERATION SEQUENCE FOR MATERIAL HANDLING AND EQUIPMENT SET-UP IN ONE-OF-A-KIND PRODUCTION

For the control of material handling and equipment setup on the shop f loor, the sequences of operations such as providing, storing, maintain ing, setting up and down production resources, need to be determined a ccording to the layout and production system configuration of the shop floor. In the case of frequent changes of shop floor layout to produc e different products in 'one-of-a-kind production' (OKP), the sequence of operations will also change frequently. This frequent change of op eration sequence creates a conflict between the robustness of the cont rol system structure and the flexibility of the production system conf iguration in the automatic control of material handling and equipment set-up. To solve this problem, a number of new concepts, such as the s ervice task logic route, the logic layout graph of shop floor, the add ress code of production resource, etc., are presented. Based on these new concepts, the layout of a shop floor can be expressed by retrievab le data in a database. Using this retrievable data the control system can automatically determine the sequence of operations and adapt to ch anges of shop floor layout without changes in the control system struc ture.