Reconfigurable Factory-wide Resource-based System Integration for Control

Next generation of manufacturing systems will need to be reconfigurable-capable of producing exactly the volume and type of products desired, exactly when demanded by the market- in order to accommodate the rapid changes in product design necessitated by ever-changing customer demands. The corresponding factory control systems will consist of a conglomeration of hardware and software resources that must work together to achieve factory-wide targets of throughput and quality. This paper addresses the requirement of consolidation of software and hardware control with the design of a factory-wide resource-based reconfigurable control system. This system extends reconfigurable software event-based control by considering a manufacturing system as a set of decentralized resources of both hardware and software instead of a set of dissimilar components. Central to the solution is a mechanism for embedding control rules in a database to determine appropriate actions corresponding to events