This paper presents a proposal for integrating materials flow, production control and quality control. The proposal is based on three principles: that materials flow must be as simple as possible, that a production control system must be compatible with the production system and that the production pace must take account of demand, capacity and quality. The paper examines the dependent relation...

The need of adaptability of production structures is continuously increased due to decrease of product life cycle and increase of the competition. The efficiency of a production system is now described not only in term of time cycle, due date, inventory level, but also in term of flexibility and reactivity in order to integrate the evolution of the market. Current methods for real time control ...

The research into multi-product production/inventory control systems has mainly assumed one of the two strategies: Make-to-Order (MTO) or Make-to-Stock (MTS). In practice, however, many companies cater to an increasing variety of products with varying logistical demands (e.g. short due dates, specific products) and production characteristics (e.g. capacity usage, setup) to different market segm...

This paper focuses on hybrid systems whose discrete state transitions depend on both deterministic and stochastic events. For such systems, after introducing a suitable hybrid model called Discrete Hybrid Stochastic Automaton (DHSA), different finite-time optimal control approaches are examined: (1) Stochastic Hybrid Optimal Control (SHOC), which “optimistically” determines the trajectory provi...

In modern production and assembly processes, conventional PLCbased architectures are state-of-the-art for control engineering and applications. These kinds of architectures cause high costs for engineering and maintenance, and specially the adaptation of applications or even hardware changes are problematic. The paper presents a new modular control architecture, designed to meet the requirement...