Advanced Autonomous Distributed Manufacturing System Using Active Database.

Abstract

The architecture of dynamic scheduling using active database is proposed to realize an autonomous distributed manufacturing system which is expected to be a next generation manufacturing system. The proposed system employ both of the centralized scheduling algorism and the distributed information processing concept to achieve efficiency and flexibility of manufacturing systems, respectively. In the system, the active database is a core module acting as a data manager. Autonomous machining cells organized by self judging and self evaluating NC machine tools receive machining orders from the active database, and send machining status as well. Dynamic sheduling is performed to send machining orders to the active database when the events such as a machine trouble and an job addition happened. The system simulator is developed to verify the performance of the proposed system. Both of efficiency and flexibility of this system is clearly shown under several case studies.