Issues surrounding supervisory control of batch manufacturing systems

From a control perspective, a batch manufacturing system is no different than mass or continuous production systems. The system has to be monitored and controlled in different but communicating levels, e.g., machine or process level, coordination level, and production management level. Each level has its own specific control functions and its own sensory data which have to be collected. There are, however, differences in regard to how various control functions have to be structured and implemented. More specifically, the supervisory controller in a batch manufacturing system must be capable of handling different control functions for different production batches. The authors discuss this and briefly describe some existing formal models for the specification and verification of supervisory controllers. They also discuss the specifics for the batch manufacturing systems, and present an example