MODELING FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS - THE CONCURRENT LOGIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a complex mechanical system capable of fabrication, machining, and assembly operations. It may be integrated with material-handling equipment and an automated storage system. An FMS is information intensive and links computer-aided design systems to numerically controlled machines, robots, and other types of equipment, all supervised by a complicated control system. In order to design, control, and understand the operation of such a system, a modeling tool with expressive power and the ability to analyze and represent the static and dynamic nature of the system is desired. Currently, modeling tools belong either to Petri net, to queuing network models, or to simulation languages. This paper presents a new approach toward the modeling and analysis of an FMS focusing on shop-floor control processes. This approach is based on concurrent logic programming, which uses the theoretical foundation of Communicating Sequential Processes, and Guarded commands with nondeterminacy. The modeling approach is implemented using Flat Concurrent Prolong (FCP) on a Sun workstation or on a VAX machine.