Fuzzy Control of Flow Shop Production Systems Using State and Output Feedback

Flow shop production lines are very common in manufacturing systems such as car assemblies, manufacturing of electronic boards, etc. In such systems all jobs (products) visit the workstations in the same sequence. In this paper, we address the problem of uncertainties in controlling the flow shop production systems. The contribution of this work is to propose two novel approaches for controlling the flow shop systems, where the control signal is the time in which parts are entered into the system. The first approach assumes that the internal completion times of different jobs of machines are measurable and the other one relies only on completion times of the whole system. It will also be shown that both the proposed controllers are robust to unpredictable occurrences of events, such as emergency situations. The simulation results will evidence the claim.