Implementation and validation of tracking control on a real manufacturing system

This master thesis for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering concerns the automation in industrial sectors, where electro-pneumatic components are commonly involved to accomplish required tasks. The more electro-pneumatic components are involved, the more complex becomes the control design. Since most of the processes that use electro-pneumatic components evolve according to the occurrence of events, i.e., they can be seen as discrete event systems, Petri nets arise as a powerful mathematical tool for the analysis and design of the control algorithms required by the automation system. Tracking control is a new control approach under development that is based on interpreted Petri nets to model and control discrete event systems. In the literature, Tracking Control has only been implemented on small cases of study that involve few electro-pneumatic components. In order to validate the required features of the Tracking Control approach under development by the research team, in this thesis we propose to design and build a fully automated manufacturing cell with 43 electro-pneumatic components, interacting in the different workstations. It is expected to implement the Tracking Control methodologies and to validate aspects such as deadlock-freeness, scalability, practical implementability, the possibility to consider industrial networks and to assure a safe operation of the system on different industrial network architectures.