Designing efficient and dependable manufacturing systems has always been a major goal of modern computer-integrated manufacturing. The dissertation proposes a methodology for developing the control software of these systems, and develops a set of software tools that enhance the applicability of this methodology. These tools aid in planning the set of operations of a manufacturing job, generating a cyclic schedule for processing a batch of jobs, and monitoring the operations of the system while this batch is being processed. The syntax and semantics of a component-oriented rule-based language for specifying the formal models of manufacturing systems is presented. A model captures the state of a component of the system in a set of first-order logic predicates, and it captures the semantics of the operations performed by this component in a set of rules that determine the preconditions and postconditions of an operation. These models are used in planning the sequence of operations of each class of jobs to be manufactured by these systems. To achieve efficiency, the reservation table technique is used to create optimum cyclic job-shop schedules for processing a batch of identical jobs or a mix of jobs from several classes on these systems. A reservation table is derived from the plan of a job. This table is then used to determine the theoretical maximum job initiation rate and the set of all possible initiation strategies for the batch. In some cases, this theoretical maximum rate is achieved by increasing the flow time of the job. The above technique inherently allows multiple devices to be reserved concurrently, it can deal with transport time explicitly, and it achieves higher initiation rates by including cycles that involve multiple job initiations. To achieve dependability, a plan-oriented fault detection and correction strategy is proposed. This strategy can automatically handle any combination of faults that may occur when monitoring the operations of manufacturing systems. A fault-tree is consulted prior to executing the scheduled operations of a plan, and the faults that affect the execution of these operations are handled subsequently. Resuming the original cyclic schedule is attempted, whenever feasible.Ph.D.Computer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103284/1/9034397.pdfDescription of 9034397.pdf : Restricted to UM users only
