A Sensor-Driven Approach to Distributed Shop Floor Planning and Control

The objective of this research is to develop methodology and framework for distributed shop floor planning, real-time monitoring, and remote device control supported by intelligent sensors. An intelligent sensor serves runtime data from bottom up to facilitate high-level decision-making. It assures that correct decisions are made in a timely manner, if compared with the best estimations of engineers. Being an adaptive system, a so-designed framework will improve the flexibility and dynamism of shop floor operations, and provide a seamless integration among process planning, resource scheduling, job execution, process monitoring, and device control. This paper presents principles of the methodology, details in architecture design, module interactions, information flow, and a proof-of-concept prototype implementation.Copyright © 2003 by ASME