Specification, modelling and control of a flexible manufacturing cell

A flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) is part of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). In general, a FMC consists of versatile workstations and storage buffers connected by a versatile material handling system. Owing to its versatile configurations and material routeing alternatives, effective modelling and control of the FMC is a complex and challenging problem. In order to resolve these difficulties, it is desired to establish a set of specifications for the FMC, then to develop a suitable model to analyse and control the performance of the FMC. Since the cell control is distributed in nature, the cell controller specifications are established in terms of cell functionality, software, hardware, and environment aspects. On the basis of the cell controller specification, a coloured timed Petri net (CTPN) is developed for modelling and control of the FMC. A cell controller including CNC controller, robot controller will be developed on the basis of the CTPN model. Finally, a FMC example is given to illustrate the use of the development.