Design of control programs for efficient handling of errors in flexible manufacturing cells

Insufficient indication of errors is a problem in many manufacturing systems. Lack of support for resynchronization of the cell and its control system is another, less obvious problem. A third problem connected to errors in manufacturing cells is lack of support for manual control. In order to resolve an error situation manual control of the cell is often required. The problem is that some of the manual operations may be blocked due to machine protection. When an operator is to execute a blocked operation the only response is that nothing happens. This paper proposes a method where control programs with integrated functions for error detection, resynchronization, and support for manual control are generated out of information that already exists in the development process of a manufacturing system.