Research Initiation: Formal Models and Grammars for Control of Flexible Manufacturing Cells

The intent of this research is to develop explicit formal models for control of flexible manufacturing cells. The models will add considerably to the development of a science base for manufacturing, and towards addressing the generic issues in control of manufacturing systems. A direct application of these models would be in the development of automatic software generators for cell control. This research presents a novel approach to control a flexible manufacturing cell, where the control actions are executed as a by product of grammar recognition. Each controller will be modeled as a layered parser capable of recognizing a 'manufacturing language', with the control actions embedded as semantic actions within each control grammar. Specific activities include: development of formal models of the physical and logical views of the manufacturing cell, establishing equivalence of properties of the FMS cell to context free grammars, defining the various semantic actions, and developing the control grammars for various controllers in the system.