Design and Development of RFID-enabled Flexible Manufacturing Cell Control System

ABSTRACT: Nowadays organizations challenge each other in highly competitive market, in which customer’s demands change frequently and swiftly. In these circumstances, organizations have to be very flexible in respond to customers to be able to survive and prosper. This flexibility lies within the control mechanism in production. Current control systems in production and manufacturing encompass some deficiencies in providing highly flexible systems. In this thesis, RFID technology has been used in manufacturing control system to overcome some of the deficiencies of current control systems. A RFID enabled control system is designed and implemented for a manufacturing cell. The proposed control system has many advantages brought by RFID technology including: bringing the real-time monitoring ability to the system, facilitating quality control and fault finding, reducing errors in management of raw material handling, production operations and finished products, enabling product customization, providing capability of reacting to incidents at production time, creating the chance of real-time customization of products and improvement of just in time manufacturing paradigm and at last providing capability of simultaneous multiple type production with no predefined order. All the proposed beneficial characteristics of the system are tested and verified at implementation phase and it is observed that the control system is absolutely applicable in industry. Keywords: Manufacturing Control System, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Flexible Manufacturing Cell. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………