This paper presents a model of a Common Rail injection system for diesel engines. The model is derived by considering the components of the system as control volumes and applying elementary fluid dynamics and mechanics laws. Suitable simplifications are introduced, to make the model adequate for control purposes, trading off between computational effort and accuracy. The model obtained is a fifth order nonlinear one, in state-space representation, and relies on simple, well defined, geometric parameters of the system. The results obtained are compared with data collected on an experimental setup, and with those obtained through the fluid dynamic simulation AMESIMreg

We investigate the functionality of fuzzy inference connectives for control. In particular, we employ selected conjunction, implication and aggregation operators, extensively used in the specialized literature, for speed control of a DC drive. The problem is approached from a practical perspective: we analyze the effect of the different connectives on the rise time performance index of the speed response obtained both in simulation and laboratory tests. Rather than the mere optimization of the DC drive, the object of the paper is the analysis of the key fuzzy controller (FC) features, in order to carry out an in-depth study of the FC operation and take full advantage of its potential.

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) are modern production facilities with easy adaptability to variable production plans and goals. These systems may exhibit deadlock situations occurring when a circular wait arises because each piece in a set requires a resource currently held by another job in the same set. Several authors have proposed different policies to control resource allocation in order to avoid deadlock problems. These approaches are mainly based on some formal models of manufacturing systems, such as Petri nets (PNs), directed graphs, etc. Since they describe various peculiarities of the FMS operation in a modular and systematic way, PNs are the most extensively used tool to model such systems. On the other hand, digraphs are more synthetic than PNs because their vertices are just the system resources. So, digraphs describe the interactions between jobs and resources only, while neglecting other details on the system operation. The aim of this paper is to show the tight connections between the two approaches to the deadlock problem, by proposing a unitary framework that links graph-theoretic and PN models and results. In this context, we establish a direct correspondence between the structural elements of the PN (empty siphons) and those of the digraphs (maximal-weight zero-outdegree strong components) characterizing a deadlock occurrence. The paper also shows that the avoidance policies derived from digraphs can be implemented by controlled PNs.

We develop control policies to avoid deadlocks in cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs). We take advantage of the structure of a CMS to develop a distributed control system in which each cell is controlled locally and independently. The controller of each cell is a local agent that adopts his own control law to improve flexibility and performance measures.

Modern production facilities (i.e. flexible manufacturing systems) exhibit a high degree of resource sharing, a situation in which deadlocks (circular waits) can arise. Using digraph theoretic concepts we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a deadlock occurrence and rigorously characterize highly undesirable situations (second level deadlocks), which inevitably evolve to circular waits in the next future. We assume that the system dynamics is described by a discrete event dynamical model, whose state provides the information on the current interactions job-resources. This theoretic material allows us to introduce some control laws (named restriction policies) which use the state knowledge to avoid deadlocks by inhibiting or by enabling some transitions. The restriction policies involve small on-line computation costs, so they are suitable for real-time implementation. For a meaningful class of systems one of these policies is the least restrictive deadlock-free policy one can find, namely it inhibits resource allocation only if leads directly to a deadlock. Finally, the paper discusses the computational complexity of all the proposed restriction policies and shows some examples to compare their performances.

Potentially, flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) possess the ability to attain efficiency and versatility in small batches, variable mix production. However, the FMS potentiality is not yet fully used, because of the high cost of specific control software. Hence, a generic software, usable in an arbitrary FMS, producing an arbitrary part mix, appears as an important means to minimize programming and re-programming effort. In this context, modeling and control problem formalization emerge as a main issue. In this paper the authors refer to Zeigler's system-theoretic formalism for modeling the dynamics of a generic FMS at the job release and job how levels. The authors' discrete event dynamic system (DEDS) model establishes an abstract comprehensive framework for developing a generic control software at such levels. The model is able to represent both hardware/software components of the FMS and processing activity plans with a common "language". A modular structure underlies the description of both the shop-floor dynamics and control rules. So, the software architecture emerges as a direct consequence of the proposed approach and consists of three main parts: the system state knowledge base, the job release manager and the job flow manager.

Two different approaches for routing optimization are proposed and compared. The first method is open-loop and selects the route so that the job percentage on each alternative path approximates an optimal offline predetermined percentage. In the second approach decision-making is based on a merit index taking into account the current work in progress and the consequent machine availability, i.e., the current system's state. The decision is taken by comparing the index values for each one of the alternative paths allows for the job entering the system. Online simulation is used to estimate the near future system's state trajectory and to compute the merit index. Some case studies are presented comparing the method in terms of efficiency and implementation effort.>