REAL-TIME SCHEDULING AND CONTROL OF TRANSPORTATION IN FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELLS

This paper reports the research done to implement a transportation control and scheduling system for a flexible manufacturing cell. The transportation system, being responsible for the transportation of tools and workparts to their proper destination, has to plan the routes of all workparts and tools to reach an optimal utilization of the cell's CNC machines and tools. For this reason three basic criteria and a coding system are proposed in this paper. After obtaining a "Processing Sequence Table" from a higher-level control and scheduling system (controlling several cells), the transportation control and scheduling system can schedule on-line workparts and tools based on the three criteria, and control the pallets to their destinations by the shortest way according to the coding system. The system was programmed in Turbo Pascal and tested by simulation.