Cell controller design for RFID based flexible manufacturing systems

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a complex system with high synchronicity. The cell controller is the central nervous system to control the entire FMS. It is no simple task to construct a good cell controller, able to effectively display synchronicity, solve conflicting events and analyse an entire system; thus, this study adopts the colour Petri net (CPN) method to construct and analyse the model, and utilises a multi-level distributed control framework to analyse the entire FMS, thus, solving all levels of control and coordination problems. This study also employs a modular design to develop an FMS cell controller based on radio frequency identification (RFID). Data values carried by CPN colour tokens, which represent real-time information, may be written to the RFID Tag. This article takes a virtual FMS in the MIBI Laboratory of the National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT) as the test object, and aims to write a program for a cell controller, which is connected with the virtual machines, and to validate the feasibility of the proposed integration method. Using a failure model analysis/repair line (FMA/R Line) of the Thin Film Transistor/Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) plant as an object for validation, this article discusses the feasibility of applying this method to a real production line. It is intended that the proposed method of developing a cell controller could serve as a reference template for tracking and control, facilitating the rapid introduction and application of RFID technology into industrial FMS in the future.