A design strategy of discrete event controllers for automated manufacturing systems

An approach is presented for designing the coordination control layer of automated manufacturing systems modeled as discrete event processes. The coordination control layer is built using the industrial standards ISA-S95.01 and ISA-S88.01. Each equipment control component of the architecture is synthesized as a standard supervisory controller. The approach includes conditions to guarantee the manufacturability of a product using the provided controllers. In order to demonstrate the use of the proposed approach a prototype manufacturing system was built using Lego (R) and Visual Basic (R).