A Distributed, Event-Driven Control Architecture for Flexibly Automated Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new distributed real-time control architecture for flexibly automated production systems. The modelling assumptions underlying the design are driven by, and abstract, the structure and operations of the emerging 300 mm semiconductor manufacturing fab, one of the most extensively automated environments in contemporary manufacturing. The key element of the controller design itself, which differentiates it from past efforts, is the distribution of the control function to the constituent components of the system shop-floor architecture, while maintaining both the logical correctness and the efficiency of the system behaviour. The architecture was designed to be easily implementable in the actual system shop-floor, and therefore is aligned with, and augments, current practices in these environments. From a theoretical perspective, the proposed design has employed, integrated and extended a series of theoretical results from the field of Discrete Event Dynamical Systems. It is our expectation that the proposed architecture will also provide a formal framework for further analytical studies on the performance evaluation and performance-oriented control/scheduling of the considered class of manufacturing systems.