Development and automation of a scaled manufacturing cell based on regulation control

Abstract

This thesis is an approach focused on industrial automation for complex manufacturing systems, which generally involves a set of devices, such as sensors and actuators in charge of executing certain tasks commanded by one or more Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). It is known that, as more devices and new technologies are integrated, such systems are more complex to control. Said automation systems can be represented by the use of formal methods, like occurrence of events, or better called as discrete event systems (DES). Regulation Control is a proposed approach to model and control discrete event systems based on Interpreted Petri Nets, which are a graphical and mathematical modeling graph that can help to represent and analyze such discrete event systems. In order to test the functionality of this Regulation Control approach, in this thesis is proposed to design, manufacture, assemble, integrate, communicate and control 3 workstations from a scaled manufacturing cell. It is expected that by implementing Regulation Control methodologies, PLCs can control the workstations by interpreting the Interpreted Petri Nets from the software RC-Petri, which is communicated through Modbus and a simple signal identification program, without the need of creating an extensive program. In turn, it is intended to test the deadlock-freeness and its practical implementability assuring a safe operation of each workstation using a General Functional Testing.