Distributed Intelligent Control of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) consists of a set of machines that are connected via tracks over which parts may be transported for processing. As parts arrive at a machine via the tracks, they are put in a buffer (queue) where they are held before they are processed. There is a local controller (scheduling policy) at each machine which decides which part type to process next; hence the overall controller for the FMS is physically distributed across the entire FMS. In this paper we show how to design an intelligent (fuzzy) controller for a single machine. In addition, we introduce an adaptive fuzzy controller which can automatically synthesize/tune itself to achieve good throughput rates for the single machine. Next we show that by using such adaptive fuzzy controllers in a distributed fashion, we obtain a distributed intelligent controller (DIC) which can automatically synthesize and tune itself and achieve good throughput rates for the entire FMS.