Comparison of two concepts of the controlling devices applied to the flexible cell

Inside an integrated manufacturing system, it is important to take into account the problem of the piloting. The piloting of the devices is bound to the architecture of the manufacturing system. Previous research of our laboratory showed that the best piloting architecture is a distributed one. Two levels of piloting are then distinguished, the higher is the cell level piloting and the lower is the station level piloting. Our experimental site is a flexible cell of the IUT of Nantes. The piloting architecture chosen for the flexible cell of IUT of Nantes is a H-distributed one. Thus, the flexible cell is split into several autonomous entities called "Stations". Two levels of piloting are distinguished, the cell level piloting is distributed and the station level piloting is centralized. In this paper, we will first present the piloting architecture of the flexible cell and the functional analysis of the automatism by the SADT method. So we will present the Fined States Automates formalisation which describes the sequence and the synchronization of the activities from the SADT decomposition. In the implementation stage, at first time, we presents the existing centralized piloting architecture. Two original solutions are proposed for the control devices following the distributed architecture.