David Gouyon

Pragmatic approach for modular control synthesis and implementation

Within the framework of Supervisory Control Theory, synthesis algorithms enable automatic generation of control rules from behavioural models of the process to be controlled and of goals to be achieved. The paper highlights a pragmatic use of these algorithms within an automation engineering context and focuses on two key issues: process and goals modelling, and supervisory controller implementation. In this way, the approach presented combines the synthesis techniques and algorithms with an object-oriented automation method that supplies guidelines for the analysis, design and implementation of a modular control system. This pragmatic approach is applied to the synthesis and implementation of the control of an assembly station. The paper highlights the difficulties of the modelling step and its great influence on the synthesis result itself, and also demonstrates the feasibility of the synthesis approach through a successful implementation in conformance with the International Electrotechnical Commission 61131-3 standard.

Control Synthesis for Product-Driven Automation

Abstract We study the problem of controlling a flexible manufacturing cell by means of automatically computed supervisors. Such a flexible control can be seen as a modular combination of product-driven supervisors and components-driven ones, mainly for control integration in a Manufacturing Execution System. Our method associates a top-down synthesis approach based on customized product specification and a bottom-up synthesis approach based on standardised components on the shelves. Practical result is a routings supervisor devoted to each product occurrence which is consistent with the manufacturing stations supervisors. Copyright

Product-Driven Automation Issues for B2M-Control Systems Integration

Enterprise-control system integration between business systems, manufacturing execution systems and shop-floor process-control systems remains a key issue for facilitating the definition, the development and the deployment of plant-wide information-control systems for e-B2M issues. Many rationales, trends and experiments are applying the HMS paradigm and its related agent-based technology in order to meet these B2M integration, interoperability and agility issues in industry. Research works presented in this paper emphasize some formal large-scale discrete-manufacturing product-driven automation issues within a broader modelling framework addressing the HMS paradigm as a pertinent system engineering approach mainly for products traceability purposes.