Stable supervisory control of flexible manufacturing systems with fixed supply and demand rates

Abstract

In this article, we develop a method for computing a stable supervisory control for a class of manufacturing systems (consisting of reconfigurable processors and buffers with limited capacities) with fixed supply and demand rates. It is shown that, with this method, we are able to (i) decide constructively whether a stable supervisory control exists for a given manufacturing system, and (ii) compute the stable supervisory control if it exists. Furthermore, the stable supervisory control thus obtained is complete in the sense that it contains all 'safe' sequences (of possibly concurrent buffer and processor activities) which guarantee the stability of the system. An example is presented to illustrate the proposed method. Implications and computational complexity associated with this method are discussed.