Scenarios in the design of flexible manufacturing systems

Modern high-tech flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) such as lithography systems, professional printers, X-ray machines, and electron microscopes are characterized by an increasingly tight coupling between machine control software and the controlled physical processes. Control software and the design and configuration of FMS have an important impact on system productivity and product quality. Model-based, scenario-based design provides means for guaranteeing and optimizing system productivity while ensuring its proper functioning. We show that abstract system-level activity models, semantically grounded in (max,+) algebra with activities capturing execution scenarios of the FMS, can be used for fast and accurate productivity analysis of FMS in early design phases. The same models can be used for supervisory controller synthesis and optimization, providing safety and performance guarantees in the supervisory control software. Finally, scenario-based, adaptive, pipelined control enables optimization of data-intensive control loops in FMS, which in turn impacts system-level productivity.