Sanjay B. Joshi
Dept. of Industrial & Management Systems Engineering
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
Erik G. Mettala
University of Texas-Arlington
Arlington, TX
Jeffrey S. Smith and Richard A. Wysk
Dept. of Industrial Engineering
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843
Currently, most control implementations of flexible manufacturing cells have been developed specific to a particular facility, and no generic format or tools exist for the systematic planning and creation of control. This paper presents the first phase of research in automatic generation of control software. It focuses on the development of theoretical foundations and generic issues necessary to understand and implement control. Specific formal models are developed for the physical activities, system actions, and individual machines comprising the manufacturing cell. In a subsequent paper, the formal models presented here are used to provide the basis for creating context free control grammars which are used to automatically generate software for controlling flexible manufacturing cells.