Model-based control for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The manufacturing industry cannot stay competitive and survive in today´s market without agile adaptation to rapidly changing customers´ demands. This in turn requires manufacturing systems to be reconfigurable for timely introduction of new products in the market. Unfortunately, at present, the system designers cannot systematically and completely manage their design data, because manufacturing systems have gradually become too large and too complicated to manage. In order to reconfigure and reuse H/W and S/W components in manufacturing systems, and improve the engineering environment of system control design, we propose a model-based control design using state transition diagrams and a general graph description, while taking reconfiguration and reuse of design data into account. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach using a real application.