Manufacturing Control Architecture for FMS with AGV: A State-of-the-Art

In environments of constant development, the production system is going more complex, focusing on new tendencies about continuous improvement for technologies in manufacturing allows to reduce times and costs of production. The implementation of new Material Handling Systems (MHS) in manufacturing line, allows decrease times for the process of transport. The MHS is utilized principally in the production system for repetitive tasks (i.e., internal and external transport for raw material and goods). Through effective implementation of an MHS, it reduces damages to the materials and risks for workers and the same time increases the efficiency of the operation. In the manufacturing, transport costs is associate to different aspects such as reduced reactivity, recovery system failures, inflexibility, low autonomy and limitation of classical architectures of a MHS, all of this is due to reduced capacities of interaction between control systems (i.e., MHS control and Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) control). For this reason, the costs of material handling can be reduced through integrated control architectures. In these circumstances, the challenge is to develop manufacturing control architecture for FMS and Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV) with reactivity to the environment changes, scalability, robustness against the occurrence of disturbances, easier integration of manufacturing resources, and autonomy and intelligence capabilities. Although specific research in this topic has achieved a number of great successes, the general framework for the development on architectural level has not been defined by the community. This paper focuses on the overview over principal development in control architecture literature for FMS, AGV and FMS-AGV, in order to overcome of different aspects of transport and the limitations of classical hierarchical architectures.