An architecture for control and monitoring of discrete events systems

Abstract

In a first part this work presents a hierarchical and modular architecture for real-time control and monitoring of Discrete Events Systems like Flexible Manufacturing Systems (F.M.S.). The first characteristic of this architecture is based on a splitting up procedure to build a hierarchical structure allowing to manage the complexity of the process. The second characteristic concerns the organization of this structure to drive the process. On the one hand, control system, monitoring system and model exhibiting the process capabilities are distributed in each node of this hierarchical structure. So each of these nodes is a `control and monitoring module'. On the other hand, a further process model more complete than the one included in each control and monitoring module is added to the hierarchical structure. The last contribution of this work introduces an inter-levels communication mechanism suitable for real-time control and monitoring requirements. The addition of a supervisor distributed in each control and monitoring module allows to manage the complex data flow taking part in the inter-levels communication.