Computation of Supervisors for Reconfigurable Machine Tools

The rapid reconfiguration of manufacturing systems is an important issue in today's manufacturing technology in order to adjust the production to varying product demands and types. In this paper, we study the control of reconfigurable machine tools (RMTs) with the aim of fast reconfiguration and an easy controller implementation. We first formulate a particular reconfiguration problem for RMTs in a discrete event system setting, and then provide necessary and sufficient conditions for its solution. Moreover, we propose an algorithm for the construction of a reconfiguration supervisor as the composition of one supervisor for each separate RMT configuration and one supervisor that performs the transition between configurations. The reconfiguration supervisor can be computed in polynomial time, and allows configuration changes within a bounded delay. In addition, our method facilitates the addition of a new configuration during system operation.