Time and Supervisory Control of Manufacturing Systems: a Flexible Manufacturing Cell experience

The objective of the present work is, firstly, to model, then control the operation times and finally to obtain performance measures for the flexible manufacturing cell under study. This cell is located in the robotics and automation laboratory in the Computer Science and Systems Engineering Department of the University of Zaragoza. The first part of this work presents the formal modelling of the flexible manufacturing cell. Using the Petri net paradigm (D. Rodriguez, 2004), the behaviour of the system is modelled, starting from the PLC programs in charge of controlling the manufacturing system. This modelling part take into account some production policies implemented in an intermediate storage station. A second task considers the possible failure and blocking situations what helps improving the raw model of the FMC. This work shows also an implementation of all these elements in commercial SCADA software and also some timing results help concluding some arguments for the inclusion of a certain production policy under certain production configurations.