PROGRAMMING, SCHEDULING, AND CONTROL OF FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS

This paper surveys the research results on flexible assembly systems at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In the first section, it describes the overall architecture of the pilot assembly system. The second section surveys the programming methodology employed for the manufacturing equipment. The third section presents the control system and discusses its capabilities. The fourth section addresses the development and the integration of an on-line reactive scheduler. Finally, the last section discusses a benchmark that was performed in the framework of the fifth IMS test case.