Hierarchical decomposition and simulation of manufacturing cells using Ada

Abstract

received the BSEE and BS in computer engineering in 1977 and the MS degree in computer, information, and control engineering in 1979 from the University of Michigan. He has been employed by Bell Laboratories since 1979 and is currently on educational leave of absence to pursue the PhD degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Mr. Antonelli is a member of the Institute of Eiectrical and Electronics Engineers and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery. His research interests include the architecture of distributed systems, distributed operating systems and languages, and software engineering. RICHARD A. VOLZ is a director of the robot systems division of the Center for Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing at the University of Michigan. Prior to this, he was associate director of the University Computer Center and associate chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Professor Volz received his education at Northwestern University, receiving a PhD in 1964 and joined the University of Michigan that year. He has worked on computational techniques for automatic control systems and done pioneering work on computer-aided-design methods for control systems. Real-time computing systems are a more recent technical interest of his, and he has led in the design and implementation of both a real-time operating system and a higher level language for real-time control. His current research interests include software/hardware computer architectures to support robot systems s and the use of geometric models obtained from computer-aided-design systems for driving robot and sensor programming. Particular projects include (CAD) model driven vision systems, automatic determination of gripping points on objects (from CAD information), graphic programming of robots and distributed systems integration languages for r real-time control.ABSTRACT A useful tool in the development of flexible automation is a system description language which can generate a complete functional description of a manufacturing cell of arbitrary complexity. We propose a description system based on the concept of hierarchical decomposition utilizing the Ada programming language in conjunction with established diagrammatical decomposition methods. The distinguishing aspect of our work is that it takes advantage of certain features of Ada (such as type checking) to create a description that can be automatically verified for consistency Simulation is often an indispensable tool in the development of manufacturing systems. We show how a simulation of the operation of the manufacturing cell can be embedded in its description. Finally, we apply the methodology to a specific instance of a manufacturing cell.

An integrated methodology for manufacturing systems design using manual and computer simulation

“…Due to the large number of decision variables, an effective approach to designing manufacturing cells and improving their performance is to use computer simulation for testing and selecting the configuration that meets the desired objectives (Antonelli, Volz, & Mudge, 1986;Watson & Sadowski, 1994). The primary objective of engineers is to obtain a superior solution by analyzing manufacturing cell simulation outputs that include throughput, utilization, time/ number in queue, and time/number in system (Mellichamp, Kwon, & Wahab, 1990).…”

Concurrent modeling language (CML) for discrete process modeling, simulation and control

“…In addition to the traditional discrete event simulation languages (which are not reactive by nature), one can find object-oriented languages (Antonelli et al, 1986;Vermeir, 1986 andBezivin, 1987), rule-based simulations (Ben-Arieh, 1988), and distributed simulation approach (Misra, 1986). Object-oriented languages are attractive due to their expressiveness of structural and functional system aspects.…”

Design of integrated manufacturing system control software

“…Either clock is compatible with our approach to simulation. The foregoing approach to simulation is an extension of [20] in which formal descriptions of manufac turing cells were extended to include simulations.…”