AN IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY FOR THE SUPERVISORY CONTROL OF FLEXIBLEMANUFACTURING WORKCELLS

The anticipated use of autonomous flexible manufacturing workcells in the near future has encouraged recent research efforts on the developm ent of automatic supervisory-control methodologies. However, despite i ntensive research on the theoretical aspects of the control of flexibl e manufacturing workcells, modeled as discrete event systems (DESs), r elatively little research has been reported on procedures for the impl ementation of DES-based supervisory controllers. In this paper, a gene ralized implementation methodology, which utilizes recent theoretical advances in conjunction with programmable logic controller (PLC) techn ology, is presented. The two primary advantages of the proposed method ology are: (1) the utilization of control strategies, synthesized with in a formal theoretical framework, that can be efficiently generated o n-line and (2) the use of PLCs, which are currently the most suitable and widely employed industrial process control technology.