Integration of EPC and a modularized colored Petri net through events for agile manufacturing cell control

Manufacturing paradigm has shifted to agile manufacturing, in which an agile manufacturing cell is the fundamental building block and is a complicated discrete dynamic system. For controlling an agile manufacturing cell, a system architecture based on the integration of event-driven process chain (EPC) and a modularized event-driven colored Petri-net (MED-CPN) was proposed. The system architecture was designed to be generic enough to be able to agilely control wide varieties of agile manufacturing cells. For achieving this goal, EPC was employed for modeling and controlling the upper level decision process and the newly proposed MED-CPN was employed for the lower level operation control, and their integration is through a set of mutually triggered parametric events. The integration of EPC and MED-CPN through parametric events makes it possible to use a generic architecture to control various manufacturing cells without redesigning the architecture.