ORCA-FMS: a dynamic architecture for the optimized and reactive control of flexible manufacturing scheduling

• A dynamic control architecture (ORCA) solves the manufacturing system scheduling.
• ORCA allows an optimized and reactive control.
• ORCA was implemented on a real flexible manufacturing system.
• Different scenarios highlighted the scalability and the robustness of the approach.
• Results are compared to the solutions of a mixed integer linear model.

Reactive and effective hybrid manufacturing control architectures, combining hierarchy and heterarchy adapted to the current constraints of the industrial market and its environment were created. In this article, a new generic hybrid control architecture called ORCA (dynamic Architecture for an Optimized and Reactive Control) is first proposed. This hybrid architecture is able to dynamically and partially switch between a hierarchical predictive architecture and a heterarchical reactive architecture, if an event forbidding the planned behavior to be followed occurs. In this article, this architecture was applied to a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) problem and denoted ORCA-FMS. ORCA-FMS was tested on an existing manufacturing cell with simulations and real experiments to prove the applicability and the effectiveness of this kind of hybrid architecture in an industrial environment.