Towards a sustainable control of complex manufacturing networks

Nowadays, development of the wide variety in different type of products requires more complex configurations of production networks of modern manufacturing industries. As a consequence, control policies,which are currently used in industry, should be improved. Thus, sustainable methods for control of complexmanufacturing networks are required. In this paper we introduce such a sustainable control method for a lineof manufacturing machines. The main objective of our method is to guaranty that the number of producedproducts follows a current production demand. First, a general idea of the so called variable structure controlmethod is given by a simple case of one manufacturing machine. Then, a flow model of a line of machines withvariable structure control is presented. Consequently, the obtained results on the uniform ultimate boundednessof the production errors of each machine in the line are discussed. Finally, performance and robustness issuesof the closed-loop flow line models are illustrated by numerical simulations.