Claudiu PLAISANU

Title: Research on Production Control Solutions Development for Holonic Manufacturing Systems

Supervisor: Professor Theodor BORANGIU

Final presentation in 2011

Control represents a key factor within automated production systems, being crucial in various stages of this process, at a high level (production planning, resources distribution, etc) and low level (production plan execution, equipment and device control and actuating , sensor data acquisition, etc).

At low level, automated equipment and devices (industrial robots, numeric control machines, controllers and programmable logic controllers) require specific control techniques in order to adapt their behavior to certain objectives, while high level control is responsible for coordinating available resources from the manufacturing system and has the purpose of elaborating desired products.

Taking into account the new requirements imposed to manufacturing companies, this thesis aims at bringing significant contributions regarding the elaboration of production control solutions within a holonic manufacturing system. The thesis has two major objectives: presenting a generic manufacturing architecture inspired by the holonic concept for high level production control, and implementing an advanced solution for low level control, that would provide production and material flow traceability into a multi-robot manufacturing platform using a programmable logic controller (PLC).

Considering as a reference model PROSA and ADACOR architectures, I have designed a structure composed from three main holon classes: product holons, task holons and resource holons, all of these being coordinated by an supervisor holon that is also able to provide global optimization of production system. In order to simplify the understanding and have a more complex view of the system, within this thesis I have approached formal modeling of structural and behavioral specifications of each of these holon classes, through Petri networks.

Through decomposition and specialization of resource holon from generic holonic control architecture there can be obtained the following subtypes of holons: transport holons, robot holons and sensor holons. For the low level control of this type of holons I have developed algorithms that provide the interconnection of devices and physical resources, sensor data acquisition, control and actuation of various equipment within a multi-robot manufacturing platform implemented within CIMR research centre. Afterwards, I have described an application that presents a total view, real time, on the entire manufacturing platform, at a global and local level, developed for dynamic monitoring of the manufacturing system and managing information regarding material flow traceability.