TOWARD REUSABLE HIERARCHICAL CELL CONTROL SOFTWARE

An approach to manufacturing system control is presented that uses a s tate diagram and an interpreter, both of which are specifically design ed for manufacturing systems. The manufacturing system's hardware comp onents are also defined external to the control software. The resultin g software illustrates that a very dynamic and reusable manufacturing control system is possible. The approach is algorithmic in nature, and has been designed to be accessible to, and integrated with, an artifi cial intelligence portion that will be responsible for reasoning relat ed to error recovery and system diagnosis. As a test of the control sy stem, a manufacturing system hardward emulation program was used that included definable failure rates.