Cellular control of flexible manufacturing systems

The authors propose augmented Lagrangian-based decomposition techniques for solving complex planning and control problems in flexible manufacturing systems. It is shown that the resulting decomposition of the mathematical problem lends itself to control systems with a topological cellular structure, and can be treated very naturally with an object-oriented programming approach. The mathematical formulation of the problem is presented. Its application to a specific example in which all the main features of the method are fully described is presented. Some computational results are presented