Hierarchical hybrid modeling and control of flexible manufacturing systems

In current manufacturing systems, short times for product development and ramp-up as well as high production rates and customized products are of increasing importance. To push the efficiency (and thus the economic gain) of production further, recent investigations combine aspects of flexible manufacturing systems with modeling and optimization techniques from the hybrid systems domain. Within this context, the contribution of this paper is two-fold: (1) a hierarchical modeling scheme is presented which suitably represents the plant dynamics on two distinct levels of detail comprising timed and hybrid automata, (2) an approach to adapt production online to changes in product specifications or production constraints by combining high-level generation of optimal production schedules with low-level learning- and model-based control.