Design of a Configurable Cell Controller for Flexible Manufacturing Systems

An ideal environment of a cell controller can provide us an integrated function. The integrated functions include an editor function, a simulation function and a monitor function in time. In our former paper (Huang et al., 2006), we have proposed the emulator environment of a real-world flexible manufacturing system. In this paper, a configurable cell controller for the flexible manufacturing systems is proposed whose has the integrated functions. The advantage of the configurable cell controller is that the engineers can reduce their efforts and can deal with some frustrating situations in the beginning of research and development. For demonstrating the configurable cell controller, a real-world flexible manufacturing system is examined in this paper.