In: The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (Online First), pages 1-32. Springer-Verlag London Ltd, June 2003.
Abstract: In this paper, an infrastructure for adaptive production control in an agile manufacturing environment is proposed. With this infrastructure, Virtual Production Systems (VPSs), each of which takes care of the production of a specific customer ordered product, can be dynamically and flexibly constructed. This can be achieved logically by product workflow and physically by the resources in one or more manufacturing systems, e.g. job shops. To respond to changes and disturbances to a VPS, architecture for the adaptive controller of a VPS is designed based on adaptive control principles and Temporised Object-Oriented Petri Nets with Changeable Structure (OPNs-CS) modelling. A case study is used in this paper to illustrate how adaptive production control of VPS functions can be conducted to cope with changes and disturbances to the production system.
Keywords: agile manufacturing; virtual production systems; adaptive production control.