Hybrid shop floor control system for Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM)

A shop floor can be considered as an important level to develop Computer Integrated Manufacturing system (CIMs). However, a shop floor is a dynamic environment where unexpected events continuously occur, and impose changes to the planned activities. To deal with this problem, a shop floor should adopt an appropriate control system that is responsible for the coordination and control of the manufacturing physical flow and information flow. In this paper, a hybrid control system is described with a shop floor activity methodology called Multi-Layered Task Initiation Diagram (MTD). The architecture of the control model contains three levels: i.e., the shop floor controller (SFC), the intelligent agent controller (IAC) and the equipment controller (EC). The methodology behind the development of the control system is an intelligent multi-agent paradigm that enables the shop floor control system to be an independent, an autonomous, and distributed system, and to achieve an adaptability to change of the manufacturing environment.