THE STATE-OF-THE-ART IN INTELLIGENT REAL-TIME FMS CONTROL - A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) have been developed with the hope that they would provide a means to tackle a threefold challenge - bet ter quality, lower cost and shorter lead times - by integrating machin e tools, robots, material handling and storage systems, and computers. Control of the integrated system presented a new set of problems as w ell as challenges, which have been receiving considerable attention fr om the academic community as well as from industrial system users. Int elligent control, which involves using computers to assist in decision making at various stages of the control process, has been advocated b y many researchers as a possible avenue to reach a solution to these p roblems. This paper provides a review of the state of the art in intel ligent control of FMS, in an attempt to supplement earlier general rev iews via a more focused perspective. The principles of several techniq ues, namely simulation, knowledge based, example based, petri nets, an d hybrid approaches are briefly introduced, and publications are revie wed, followed by discussions on their potential. Suggestions for furth er research and development are also enumerated.