A synthesis approach to distributed supervisory control design for manufacturing systems with Grafcet implementation

What is it about?

A novel algorithmic approach for the design of modular, distributed and concurrent controllers interpreted as Grafcet for PLC-based implementation purposes is developed. The design exploits local models of the system and requires a limited exchange of information among local controllers and respect the implementation flexibility required in distributed systems. Our approach reduces the computational complexity inherent to discrete event systems and ensures implementation flexibility. The computational complexity is reduced through local synthesis i.e. a local controller is synthesized for each subsystem of the overall system. Then, information is shared among the local controllers to cooperatively execute the control actions. The implementation flexibility is achieved because the system modifications might be made over the corresponding subsystems only, which results in updating only their corresponding controllers.

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Why is it important?

Synthesis methods consist of systematically constructing control models, which guarantee by construction the respect of the specifications. These are therefore taken into account from the beginning of the design, which avoids human errors during the control synthesis, and enables swift reaction to blockings and changes in case of redesigns. Yet we believe there exists great promise for this type of modular/distributed control synthesis approach to advance the technology of large scale systems control.

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