Control program design for a flexible manufacturing didactic cell

An alternative way to program the controller of a Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC) is to use the proposed theory by Huang, Lewis, Pastravanu & Gurel (1995) called the matrix based approach for discrete event systems. This theory was designed to run on computers, where execution of binary matrix operations in real time is not a problem; however the implementation of these operations in commercial programmable controllers (PLC) is not realizable in direct way, because most of the PLCs are programmed using graphics language as the called Ladder Logic Diagram (LLD). The above restriction causes this powerful programming tool, excludes the majority of the PLC. This paper describes the interpretation of the Matrix Based Approach to be able to implement on a commercial PLC. The controller designed was tested with three production policies in a flexible manufacturing cell multi reentrant (MRF) located at the Technological Institute of Costa Rica, the purpose of the tests was to observe the performance of the manufacturing cell with different dispatch policies production.