A design tool for shop floor control systems

Abstract

This chapter describes a design tool which can be used to support the design, development and implementation of shop floor control systems within a particular manufacturing environment. This chapter illustrates the use of the design tool to support the development of PAC systems at the cell level of manufacturing. It is important to emphazise that the tool may also be used to support the development of suitable control structures for FC, although it is not suitable to experiment with production environment design techniques. This design tool, the Application Generator (AG), is collection of software modules which interact together in a distributed computing environment. The interesting aspects of the AG are twofold: firstly it uses an artificial intelligence approach to aid in the selection of suitable control strategies (scheduling and dispatching); secondly, its distributed simulation approach identifies a clear migration path from the experimental world of simulation modelling to the reality of real-time manufacturing. Within this chapter the overall objectives of the AG will be discussed, and each of the software modules which constitute the AG will be described in detail.