Database Design for Flexible Manufacturing Cells

Abstract One very important aspect when designing modern manufacturing systems is flexibility, such as product flexibility, expansion flexibility and routing flexibility. This paper presents a reference architecture for control systems which has a structure that promotes flexibility. Since a control system is a highly information-intensive system it is very important that the information is stored in a suitable manner. One viable approach is to rely on a database system for the information storage. A database system has inherently a good separation between the structure of a design and the related data. This paper presents the conceptual information design of our generic control system and it is compared with a case study of an existing machining cell.