Designing function blocks for distributed process planning and adaptive control

The objective of this research is to develop methodologies and a framework for distributed process planning and adaptive control using function blocks. Facilitated by a real-time monitoring system, the proposed methodologies can be applied to integrate with functions of dynamic scheduling in a distributed environment. A function block-enabled process planning approach is proposed to handle dynamic changes during process plan generation and execution. This paper focuses mainly on distributed process planning, particularly on the development of a function block designer that can encapsulate generic process plans into function blocks for runtime execution. As function blocks can sense environmental changes on a shop floor, it is expected that a so-generated process plan can adapt itself to the shop floor environment with dynamically optimized solutions for plan execution and process monitoring.