ENABLING HARDWARE-BASED TECHNOLOGIES FOR REAL-TIME SIMULATION AND CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

A multi-microprocessor based simulator specifically designed for real-time simulation and control of flexible manufacturing systems can be one way to solve the problem of lacking suitable hardware platform for real-time simulation in the shop floor. The fundamental idea of mapping FMS to a hardware-based simulator is prompted by the dramatic, continuing advancement of microprocessor and parallel computing technologies. Enabling electronic technologies valuable to realize proposed simulator, such as digital signal processors, VMEbus backplane, multi-port SRAM, are introduced in this paper. Moreover, three possible architectures for this simulator, namely, the bus-based, the shared-memory-based and the parallel I/O port based multi-microprocessor architecture, are discussed. Preliminary research result shows such a simulator is a promising way to realize the truly real-time simulation.