A Development Toolkit to Support the Architecture of Flexible Manufacturing Systems Based on Intelligent Autonomous Units

Abstract

In this paper we propose a concept for a LEGO-like toolkit and a unique architecture for an autonomous factory. The toolkit faciliate a programming environment for developing, simulating and testing a manufacturing application. This significantly helps t o reduce programming times and results in a better software quality. The components of this toolkit are modelled b y intelligent units that run in parallel. The units exchange asynchronous messages according to a task-oriented service protocol. Such services hide the internals of the units completely and form the basis for flexible combination and exchange. Every unit consists of three parallel sub-processes: controller, planner and exception handler. The controller is responsible for performing a task. The planner must derive solutaons i f a service can’t be provided b y using predefined programs. The exception handler’s purpose is t o find and direct suitable reactions t o zncoming error messages. The intelligent behavior of each unit depends on the algorithms used b y the planner of each unit and on the contents of the common knowledge base.