Abstract The manual design of monolithic controllers for flexible manufacturing systems is no longer feasible due to the sheer size of the problem. A well-known approach to tackle this scalability… Click to show full abstract
Abstract The manual design of monolithic controllers for flexible manufacturing systems is no longer feasible due to the sheer size of the problem. A well-known approach to tackle this scalability problem is to create a set of smaller controllers and orchestrate their interaction in an architecture. Another approach is to use synthesis techniques to generate a controller model from models of the uncontrolled system and the formalized requirements. In this paper we describe a pragmatic approach that combines the complementary advantages of these two approaches, where we decompose the design problem of the controller into a number of sub-controllers by introducing intermediate interfaces and use supervisory controller synthesis to synthesize the sub-controllers. We have evaluated this approach on an industrial case study, where we examined a large controller in a lithography machine. We found that the approach can successfully be used to generate a large portion of the needed sub-controllers.
               
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