Successful Integration of Automated Production Equipment

Effective deployment and operation of flexibly automated production systems is of ever-increasing importance in contemporary competitive manufacturing. Yet, currently we lack an adequate methodology for effective deployment, reconfiguration and control of these systems, partly due to the fact that past research has not systematically modeled and analyzed the logical/structural aspects characterizing their behavior. The importance and criticality of these problems becomes even clearer once it is realized that they are directly related to the operationalization and effective management of the flexibility inherent in these systems. This paper seeks to formally introduce the control problem related to the establishment of logically correct and robust behavior for flexibly automated production systems as a separate class of problems in the hierarchical decomposition framework typically used for the realtime control of these environments. It also outlines an analytical framework able to support the systematic study of these behavior/structure-oriented problems, and surveys some key results developed in the area. The last part of the paper considers the integration of structure-oriented control with the performanceoriented control which is the more “traditional” concern in production planning and control -, demonstrates some interesting effects arising from the combined study of these two issues, and suggests directions for future research.