A modular command filtering approach to coordination of flexible manufacturing systems

Abstact: This paper was motivated by the requirement of remote coordination for flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), in which certain requested commands may lead to undesired states. For such discrete event systems (DES), this paper applies a command filtering scheme for modeling and synthesis of filters using Petri nets so as to guarantee that the closed coordinated manufacturing system satisfies the requirements. Moreover, a systematic algorithm for the design and integration of modular command filters is proposed in order to cope with the complexity and realization issues in large-scale FMS. To show the practicability of the developed method, an application to an FMS with three product types is provided. The proposed approach contributes a promising tool for preventing undesirable actions from occurring in FMS which may be also applied to other types of DES if appropriately modified.