Arezzo-flexible manufacturing system: A generic flexible manufacturing system shop floor emulator approach for high-level control virtual commissioning

The benchmark of several high-level control strategies is required during the design of flexible manufacturing systems. Virtual commissioning is a popular approach to test and validate the behavior of the target control system based on a virtual model. It can actually simulate and help study the behavior of electro-mechanical shop floor components, characterized by a physical layer and low-level control functions but it fails to simulate the behavior of high-level control functions, such as dynamic resource allocation and product routing. Thus, virtual commissioning of the flexible manufacturing system can be a complex task because it requires to model the low- and high-level control functions in different software environments and to connect them through a specific interface. Switching from “virtual” to “real” remains a challenging issue since it requires to connect the high-level control functions to the real system through the real interface. This article introduces and details the Arezzo-flexible manufacturing system approach for supporting the virtual commissioning of the flexible manufacturing system, including the distinct but consistent modeling of their low- and high-level control functions. The Arezzo-flexible manufacturing system approach consists in gradually defining an emulator of the shop floor to which several candidate high-level control strategies can connect through a standard interface layer. The interface layer to the virtual shop floor emulates the real interface layer to the real shop floor, so that switching from the virtual to the real environment is straightforward. In this article, both the emulator design method and the involved generic components needed are described in turn. A real flexible cell is used as a case study to demonstrate the Arezzo-flexible manufacturing system approach and some illustrations are provided to emphasize the similarity between the shop floor emulator obtained (Arezzo-APV) and the real shop floor (Aip-Primeca flexible manufacturing system cell).

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