Control of flexible manufacturing cells

A flexible manufacturing cell integrates devices to execute the goals of overall factory production control system. Such cells should be readily adapted to perform new tasks and be capable of detecting errors to recover or degrade gracefully. An approach to allow this is the distribution of intelligence to individual device hardware and software using the concept of an `actor´, an actor based cell being a flexible collection of such actors that co-operate in the set-up and control processes. The paper presents a methodology to facilitate cell set-up and control based on the actor concept