The working and exploitation modes of flexible manufacturing systems

Most life cycles of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) do not integrate the phase of exploitation. Whereas problems of economic kind and the technological evolution have a tendency to complicate particularly the task of the operator. He must indeed make more fast decisions and integrate more numerous parameters with a reduced margin of maneuver. He needs assistance to help him in the re-configuration of his FMS and its exploitation in degraded modes. The authors propose in this paper a functional and a synchronous real-time extension to S. Bois´ representation of FMSs (1991)