Applications of reconfigurable manufacturing systems:A laboratory case study

Reconfiguration control for discrete events system (DES) is applicable to the design of industrial manufacturing systems in order to support changes in the variety and the quantity of products. Hereby, reconfiguration control is concerned with the realization of different system configurations that become active on request. A manufacturing system that is subject to reconfiguration control is denoted as a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS). In practice, RMS are of large size with many manufacturing components and hence come with a large design complexity. In this thesis, we develop a method for the reconfiguration control of largescale RMS and reconfigurable machine tools (RMT). We propose to first construct modular reconfiguration supervisors that realize the desired configurations and configuration changes for modular components of the overall RMS. Then, we apply abstraction-based control in order to combine the operation of the different RMS modules. As a result, we obtain a hierarchy of reconfiguration supervisors that allow changes to any desired configuration at any time. Since, we use the technique of hierarchical abstraction, our method is applicable to large-scale RMS, different from all existing approaches in the literature that focus on a monolithic design. We demonstrate the applicability of our method by a large-scale laboratory RMS with 18 manufacturing components and a controller hierarchy with 4 levels.