Design of a monitoring environment for manufacturing systems management and optimization

Because manufacturing systems are highly computer-based, efficient monitoring tools are required to achieve various goals: The reactivity of the system, the optimization of the production rate and the quality follow-up. A monitoring environment is defined as a set including: a programmable controller for the physical system handling, a monitoring control system for the production management and a decisional system for the computation of control operations. This paper focuses on a generic framework to facilitate the design of any specific monitoring environment and to permit the integration of optimization tools. We propose a methodology that can be used either to build this generic framework, or to create an instance of a specific monitoring environment. The generic framework is a generic monitoring environment composed of three generic models: a target-shaped model for the static view, a SA/RT (Structured Analysis method for Real Time systems) model to identify clearly the environment processes as well as the data flows and the control flows they exchange, and a Petri net for the dynamic issues. An industrial application is presented concerning the monitoring of an industrial surface treatment line being implemented on site, for which specific optimization tools have been realized and integrated.