Abstract
Flexible manufacturing systems have become more and more complex. To fulfil the Increasing requirements it is necessary to decompose FMS into easy to survey networks of subsystems. With these networks efficiency can be increased by implementation on distributed and dedicated hardware. The effort required to make FMS robust and adaptable is kept low. This paper states the requirements for subsystems. DESys is introduced as a tool for design and composition of heterogeneous networks of cooperating autonomous expert systems based on the concept of activity cells (Heukeroth, 1988). The flexibility, simpleness and uniformity of structure and communication are the outstanding features of the DESys concept. Its basic structure, a frame to be filled from component libraries, is derived from previous works focussing on the autonomy and the special communication capabilities. DESys is implemented under Microsoft-Windows on IBM-compatible PCs and can be used as a comprehensive tool to build up efficient and robust distributed FMS in a transparent way.
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