Multilevel control of flexible manufacturing systems

Typical manufacturing equipment for small and medium scale production is arranged in a setup of a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC). Normally, advanced manufacturing machinery in a FMC are individually well capable and equipped for offline programming. However, in terms of coordinated control between these machines there is a lack of capability. Especially in smaller production facilities, where the FMC components often are a mixture of older (poorly documented) and newer machines, there exist no ready-to-use (standard) solution for communication between the members of the cell. This paper presents an architecture for inter-machine communication and control based on an existing middleware framework. Further, and in detail, a vision system for rapid/simple/secure and low cost data retrieval from old computerized numerical control (CNC) machines is presented as a system key component. The architecture and vision system is general in its layout and can be utilized on a large majority of the components in flexible manufacturing systems.