Synthesis of product-driven coordination controllers for a class of discrete-event manufacturing systems

A synthesis approach is proposed for discrete-event coordination architectures applied to a class of automated manufacturing systems (AMS) in which a clear separation is established between equipment control activities and product manufacturing procedures. Manufacturing procedures are modeled by regular languages constructed with a class of control commands named imperative. Equipment controllers are synthesized as a standard discrete-event supervisors dealing only with operational and safety issues of equipment groupings. The control of equipment modules is carried out following the imperative control commands sequences. Conditions are established to guarantee that the manufacturing procedure of a given product can be achieved using the synthesized supervisors in a particular AMS. Therefore, equipment controllers are not needed to be modified to consider the manufacturing of different products, whilst the construction of achievable manufacturing procedures becomes an “ad hoc” simple process using a reduced set of procedural blocks. The approach is illustrated with an experimental AMS.