Analysis and Control of Dynamic Reconfiguration Processes of Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Dynamic reconfiguration techniques can greatly improve the flexibility and reliability of manufacturing systems. However, different from static reconfigurable systems, system behavior during dynamic reconfiguration processes is quite complex due to possible concurrence of system structure changes and events inside unaltered components. This increases the difficulty in designing and developing dynamic reconfigurable systems. The current paper deals with the analysis and control of dynamic reconfiguration process of manufacturing systems from the perspective of discrete event systems. To this end, the authors improve the reconfigurable timed net condition/event systems formalism by assigning reconfiguration functions with extra permeating time, action ranges, and concurrent decision functions. As a consequence, nondeterministic behavior of a dynamic reconfigurable system during dynamic reconfigurations can be specified, while the system correctness, coherence, and safety during reconfigurations can be guaranteed. A reconfigurable manufacturing plant is used as a running example to illustrate the contribution of this paper.