Modelling Autonomous Assembly Systems and FMS Using Cellular Automata

Abstract

This paper presents a cellular automaton model for autonomous assembly Systems and flexible manufacturing Systems (FMS). In this model, resources are represented as cells. Resources which can perform some actions are called active and those that may be used by other resources are called passive. States of a cell represent the actions performed by the associated resource or the number of accesses by other resources. Neighbourhood relationship among cells represents existing dependencies among associated resources. Local transition from state to state within a cell depends not only on the cell itself but also on the states of its neighbours. This model can easily and precisely model some very important characteristics of FMS such as concurrency, deadlock, conflict, buffer size, error identification and recovery. We also develop a set of graphical Symbols to represent the components in the model. Thus each cellular automaton model for FMS can be clearly illustrated by a graph and can be easily understood. This makes this model also suitable for designing FMS. In this paper, we shall describe this model in detail and present an example on modelling an autonomous assembly system.