Manufacturing plant control challenges and issues

Enterprise control system integration between business systems, manufacturing execution systems and shop-floor process-control systems remains a key issue for facilitating the deployment of plant-wide information control systems for practical e-business-to-manufacturing industry-led issues. Achievement of the integration-in-manufacturing paradigm based on centralized/distributed hardware/software automation architectures is evolving using the intelligence-in-manufacturing paradigm addressed by IMS industry-led R&D initiatives. The remaining goal is to define and experiment with the next generation of manufacturing systems, which should be able to cope with the high degree of complexity required to implement agility, flexibility and reactivity in customized manufacturing. This introductory paper summarizes some key problems, trends and accomplishments in manufacturing plant control before emphasizing for practical purposes some rationales and forecasts in deploying automation over networks, holonic manufacturing execution systems and their related agent-based technology, and applying formal methods to ensure dependable control of these manufacturing systems.