Automatic determination of operation sequence for material handling and equipment set-up in one-of-a-kind production

Abstract

For the control of material handling and equipment setup on the shop floor, the sequences of operations such as providing, storing, maintaining, setting up and down production resources, need to be determined according to the layout and production system configuration of the shop floor. In the case of frequent changes of shop floor layout to produce different products in 'one-of-a-kind production' OKP , the sequence of operations will also change frequently. This frequent change of operation sequence creates a conflict between the robustness of the control system structure and the flexibility of the production system configuration in the automatic control of material handling and equipment set-up. To solve this problem, a number of new concepts, such as the service task logic route, the logic layout graph of shop floor, the address code of production resource, etc., are presented. Based on these new concepts, the layout of a shop floor can be expressed by retrievable data in a database. Using this retrievable data the control system can automatically determine the sequence of operations and adapt to changes of shop floor layout without changes in the control system structure.