A FRAMEWORK FOR THE COORDINATION AND CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELLS

The goal of this paper is to develop a suitable coordination and control framework for a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) within a five level hierarchical structure consistent with a large-scale Flexible Manufacturing System consisting of facility, shop, cell, workstation, and equipment levels. The focus is on the interaction between the cell controller and the workstation controllers below it. The cell controller is partitioned into adaptation, optimization, and regulation layers. The approach taken addresses the issue of decomposing the scheduling problem via dioid algebra. It is shown that this decomposition is mathematically realizable. A characterization for the coordination problem is presented in terms of dioid algebra.