Virtual FMS Architecture for FMS Prototyping

Proposed in the paper is a V-FMS (Virtual Flexible Manufacturing System) model to be used as a prototyping tool for FMS design. The proposed V-FMS framework follows an object-oriented modeling (OOM) paradigm and is based on a set of user requirements for FMS prototyping. The V-FMS model consists of four types of object: virtual device, transfer handler, state manager and flow controller. A virtual device model, which corresponds to a static model in OOM, consists of two parts, shell and core, for reusability. A transfer handler corresponds to a functional model of OOM and it stores low level device commands required to perform job flow operations between giving and taking devices. The state manager and the flow controller constitute a dynamic model of OOM. The proposed V-FMS model has been implemented for a couple of linear type FMS-lines.