Fuzzy Supervisory Based Capacity Allocation Control for Manufacturing Systems

In this paper, a fuzzy supervisory control technique for manufacturing systems is proposed. The developed method uses a hierarchical structure consisting of a supervisor at the higher level and sub-controllers at the lower one. Each sub-controller regulates the production flow at each production resource in order to: reduce the difference between the cumulative production and demand, avoid overloading, and eliminate machine starvation or blocking. Based on the information about the overall system´s performance, the supervisor tunes the predesigned local controllers by adjusting the production capacity of each resource. The feasibility of the proposed method is illustrated by a simulation example for a manufacturing system.