ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the autonomous supervisory control of part flow within networked flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). In manufacturing industries that employ FMSs, automation has significantly evolved since the introduction of computers onto factory floors. Today, in extensively networked environments, computers play the role of planners as well as that of high-level controllers. The preferred network architecture is a hierarchical one: in the context of production control, a hierarchical network of computers (distributed on the factory floor) have complete centralized control over the sets of devices within their domain, while receiving operational instructions from a computer placed above them in the hierarchical tree.
