A flexible control system for flexible manufacturing systems

A flexible workcell controller has been developed using a three level control hierarchy (workcell, workstation, equipment). The cell controller is automatically generated from a model input by the user. The model consists of three sets of graphs. One set of graphs describes the process plans of the parts produced by the manufacturing system, one set describes movements into, out of and within workstations, and the third set describes movements of parts/transporters between workstations. The controller uses an event driven Petri net to maintain state information and to communicate with lower level controllers. The control logic is contained in an artificial neural network. The Petri net state information is used as the input to the neural net and messages that are Petri net events are output from the neural net. A genetic algorithm was used to search over alternative operation choices to find a "good" solution. The system was fully implemented and several test cases are described

Symbolic Supervisory Control of Resource Allocation Systems

<p>Supervisory control theory (SCT) is a formal model-based methodology for verification and synthesis of supervisors for discrete event systems (DES). The main goal is to guarantee that the closed-loop system fulfills given specifications. SCT has great promise to assist engineers with the generation of reliable control functions. This is, for instance, beneficial to manufacturing systems where both products and production equipment might change frequently.</p> <p>The industrial acceptance of SCT, however, has been limited for at least two reasons: (i) the analysis of DES involves an intrinsic difficulty known as the state-space explosion problem, which makes the explicit enumeration of enormous state-spaces for industrial systems intractable; (ii) the synthesized supervisor, represented as a deterministic finite automaton (FA) or an extended finite automaton (EFA), is not straightforward to implement in an industrial controller.</p> <p>In this thesis, to address the aforementioned issues, we study the modeling, synthesis and supervisor representation of DES using binary decision diagrams (BDDs), a compact data structure for representing DES models symbolically. We propose different kinds of BDD-based algorithms for exploring the symbolically represented state-spaces in an effort to improve the abilities of existing supervisor synthesis approaches to handle large-scale DES and represent the obtained supervisors appropriately.</p> <p>Following this spirit, we bring the efficiencies of BDD into a particular DES application domain -- deadlock avoidance for resource allocation systems (RAS) -- a problem that arises in many technological systems including flexible manufacturing systems and multi-threaded software. We propose a framework for the effective and computationally efficient development of the maximally permissive deadlock avoidance policy (DAP) for various RAS classes. Besides the employment of symbolic computation, special structural properties that are possessed by RAS are utilized by the symbolic algorithms to gain additional efficiencies in the computation of the sought DAP. Furthermore, to bridge the gap between the BDD-based representation of the target DAP and its actual industrial realization, we extend this work by introducing a procedure that generates a set of "guard" predicates to represent the resulting DAP.</p> <p>The work presented in this thesis has been implemented in the SCT tool Supremica. Computational benchmarks have manifested the superiority of the proposed algorithms with respect to the previously published results. Hence, the work holds a strong potential for providing robust, practical and efficient solutions to a broad range of supervisory control and deadlock avoidance problems that are experienced in the considered DES application domain.</p

Energy-Efficient Technologies for High-Performance Manufacturing Industries

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Modelling deadlock in queueing systems

Motivated by the needs of Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, this thesis ex- plores three themes: the phenomenon of deadlock in queueing systems, the develop- ment of discrete event simulation software, and applying modelling to the evaluation of the effects of a new healthcare intervention, Stay Well Plans, for older people in Gwent. When customers in a restricted queueing network become mutually blocked, and all possible movement ceases, that system becomes deadlocked. This thesis novelly investigates deadlock. A graph theoretical method of detecting deadlock in discrete event simulations is given, analytical models of deadlocking systems are built, and these are used to investigate the effect of system parameters on the expected time until reaching deadlock. Furthermore a deadlock resolution procedure is proposed. An open source discrete event simulation software, Ciw, is developed. This software is designed and developed using best practice principles. Furthermore it permits the use of best practice, such as reproducibility, in simulation modelling. Ciw is used for the modelling of a healthcare system, in order to evaluate the effect of Stay Well Plans. During the development of these models, a number of techniques are employed to overcome the difficulties of lack of data. Insightful results from these models are obtained, indicating a shift in demand from residential care services to community care services

Evaluation et gestion de la flexibilité dans les chaînes logistiques : nouveau cadre général et applications

This thesis focuses on flexibility issues in supply chain. These issues are becoming more and more important for firms because of the increasingly changing business environment and customer behaviors. Although some of these issues have been tackled in academic research in recent years, but studies have mainly concentrated in conceptual levels and there is little consensus even on the definition of flexibility. This thesis aims at defining a new framework for the supply chain flexibility, proposing quantitative measures of the flexibility and optimizing the use of flexibility, especially in an integrated production and transportation planning context. The new framework of supply chain flexibility is based on classification of different flexibility aspects in a supply chain into three main categories - manufacturing flexibility,logistic chain flexibility and system flexibility. These flexibility types are further distinguished into major flexibility dimension and other flexibility dimension.In order to measure supply chain flexibility from a quantitative point of view, Mechanical Analogy method is particularly discussed. A procedure is established to enlarge and carry out this method in supply chain, provided with a case study to evaluate the flexibility of Louis Vuitton stores.One of the most important issues is to optimally make use of the available flexibility. We investigate an Integrated Production and Transportation Planning problem with given flexibility tolerances, where the production and transportation activities are intimately linked to each other and must be scheduled in a synchronized way. Particularly, heterogeneous vehicles are taken into account. Two mixed integer linear programming models are constructed.Three algorithms are developed and compared with linear relaxation bounds for large sized real life instances and with optimal solutions for small sized instances. These comparisons show the effectiveness of our heuristics in solving real life problemsCette thèse étudie la problématique de la flexibilité dans les chaînes logistiques. La recherche académique a commencé à s’intéresser à cette problématique depuis quelques années, mais les études existantes restent pour la plupart au niveau conceptuel et il y a peu de consensus sur la définition même de la flexibilité. Cette thèse a pour ambition de définir un nouveau cadre pour la flexibilité dans les chaînes logistiques, proposer des mesures quantitatives pour la flexibilité et enfin optimiser l’utilisation de la flexibilité, en particulier dans un contexte de planification intégrée de la production et du transport.Ce travail de thèse vise tout d’abord à établir un nouveau cadre pour la flexibilité de la chaîne logistique, où les différents aspects de la flexibilité sont classifiés en trois catégories principales: flexibilité de la production, flexibilité de la chaîne logistique et flexibilité du système. Dans chacune de ces catégories, on peut trouver des dimensions primordiales et des dimensions moins importantes.Afin d’évaluer la flexibilité de manière quantitative, nous faisons appel à la méthode Analogie Mécanique. Cette méthode propose une analogie entre un système mécanique vibratoire et une chaîne logistique. Dans ce contexte, nous avons développé une étude de cas pour Louis Vuitton afin d’évaluer la flexibilité de leurs magasins, et nous avons établi une procédure pour implémenter cette méthode.Une autre problématique importante est l’utilisation optimale de la flexibilité existante.Nous nous sommes particulièrement intéressés à la planification intégrée de la production et du transport avec des flexibilités sur la capacité de transport, où la production et le transport sont intimement liés du fait du manque de capacité de stockage et doivent être planifiées conjointement. Particulièrement, les véhicules hétérogènes sont pris en compte.Nous avons construit deux modèles de programmation linéaire en nombres mixtes et développé trois algorithmes qui ont été comparées par rapport à la relaxation linéaire pour les instances de grande taille et aux solutions optimales pour des instances de petite taille. Ces comparaisons montrent que les heuristiques proposées sont efficaces pour résoudre des problèmes réels, aussi bien en termes de qualité de solution qu’en termes de temps de calcul

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen