Abstract The car of the future will be driven by software and offer a variety customisation options. Enabling these options forces modern automotive manufacturers to update their standardised scheduling concepts for testing commissioning cars. A flexible concept means that every chosen customer configuration code must have its own procedure. This is essential provide individual workflows where ...

Deadlock-free operation is essential for operating highly automated manufacturing systems. The seminal deadlock avoidance procedure, Banker’s algorithm, was developed for computer operating systems, an environment where very little information regarding the future resource requirements of executing processes is known. Manufacturing researchers have tended to dismiss Banker’s algorithm as too co...

Among all kinds of possible faults in a manufacturing system, operational faults occur most often (about 70%). Efficient diagnosis of these faults is critical for improving the availability and productivity of the manufacturing system. This paper presents a hierarchical diagnosis model based on fault tree analysis and two other diagnosis models respectively based on the logic and sequential con...

The efficiency of transportation system management plays an important role in the planning and operation efficiency of flexible manufacturing systems. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) are part of diversified and advanced techniques in the field of material transportation which have many applications today and act as an intermediary between operating and storage equipment and are routed and contr...

To better understand future needs in manufacturing and their enabling technologies, a survey of experts in manufacturing has been conducted. The survey instrument (i.e., questionnaire) tries to assess the experience to date with the use of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) and to examine the potential roles and enabling technologies for reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). The results...

Highly flexible manufacturing systems require continuous run-time (self-) optimization of processes with respect to diverse parameters, e.g., efficiency, availability, energy consumption etc. A promising approach for achieving (self-) optimization in manufacturing systems is the usage of the context sensitivity approach based on data streaming from high amount of sensors and other data sources....

Future manufacturing environments will be flexible and highly automated with control systems built as networks of computers. These computers will be expected to be adaptable, reconfigurable and fault-tolerant, operating autonomously and yet cooperating to perform the manufacturing task. This MICRO project has focused on the infrastructure required for building distributed manufacturing control ...

Software systems used in manufacturing control (especially the flexible manufacturing systems or some parts CIM) often have an architecture possessing many advantageous software engineering properties. Some techniques related to the architecture called software confederation (e.g. interface stability and incremental development) are discussed. Surprisingly enough the architecture of software co...

In recent years, a great deal of research has been focused on preventing deadlock in Flexible Manufacturing Systems. Policies based largely on Petri net models have been presented in the literature. Recently, a quite different approach has been developed based on supervisory control theory, and it has been adapted to solve the nonblocking maximally permissive control problem in various resource...