| A Discrete Event System (DES) is a dynamic system that evolves in accordance with the abrupt occurrence, at possibly unknown irregular intervals, of physical events. DESs arise in fields such as manufacturing, robotics, networking, traffic control, inventory management and operating systems. This research makes own contributions on the mixed initiative human-computer supervision problem and DES implementation in manufacturing.; Supervisory Control Theory (SCT) and its application under computer supervision of complex discrete event systems have received much attention in the last decade. However, the problem of synthesizing computer supervisors, taking into consideration the human operator's interaction with them, has not been addressed within the formal framework. This research develops a framework that integrates the human operator's interaction to computer supervisor synthesis for manufacturing systems. It not only provides an effective method for designing operator interfaces to computer supervised, automated systems, but also forms a suitable basis for modeling situations in which a flexible manufacturing system must accommodate unstructured manual interaction in the normal operation.; A rapid prototyping environment, electro-mechanical workbench (EMBench), which supports physical design, control configuration, simulation and implementation processes for manufacturing systems and embeds the SCT framework into automation system design, particularly in the field of control logic design and on-line dynamic control. The entire system is developed in pure java and constructed on IEC-61499 concepts, and the service-layer architecture serves to structure both the design process and the resulting implementation. The kernel part of control and simulation are encapsulated in IEC61499 function blocks.; In this research, several SCT and design software tools are being developed to provide different services for manufacturing automations. They are FBSCT, supporting software package for supervisory control logic design and verification; Open HMI Builder, an easy-use GUI development tool; and enhanced simulation tool with Simulink using IEC61499. All these tools can help academical users in various fields for system design and modeling. |
