A SHOP-FLOOR CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR COMPUTER-INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING

The evolution to computer-integrated manufacture (CIM) has been slower than expected. This can be attributed directly to high software devel opment and maintenance costs and the difficulty in achieving the requi red levels of integration between systems. These problems are especial ly evident in the development of the shop-floor control system (SFCS). Many researchers have developed 'standard' CIM architectures. However , these structures are often verbose, textual descriptions that are am biguous and lack formality. This makes descriptions based on these arc hitectures unsuitable as a basis for control software development. Fur thermore, without a formal language for describing manufacturing syste ms it is difficult for researchers to discuss and compare different sy stem configurations. In view of these problems, this paper identifies a formal structure for shop-floor control. The formal structure is bas ed on a three-level hierarchical control architecture. The purpose of this structure is to allow manufacturing systems to be described compl etely and unambiguously. This description can then be used as a basis for control software development, which will simplify the implementati on of automated CIM systems.