Evaluating the performance of reactive control architectures for manufacturing production control

The requirement for adaptable and re-configurable control systems for manufacturing has highlighted the inadequacies of traditional centralised control approaches, leading researchers to focus on decentralised approaches. The question of what is the most appropriate control architecture for a given system has led industrial and academic researchers to develop a spectrum of decentralised control architectures ranging from hierarchical to non-hierarchical structures. While current research has confirmed the potential of decentralised architectures, neither extreme of this control architecture spectrum has proven to be the most appropriate choice for a given manufacturing system. Recent research into providing an objective comparison of alternative control architectures has shown that some degree of hierarchy is important for distributed manufacturing control architectures. This paper is concerned with our current investigations into why these partial hierarchies appear to display superior performance.