Enhancing the Flexibility of Manufacturing Systems Using the RFID Technology

Valentin VLAD, Adrian GRAUR, Cristina Elena TURCU, Cezar POPA Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava

Introduction

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) represents a very suitable technology for data acquisition and process control in the industrial manufacturing sites, due to its characteristics: waterproof, antimagnetic, high temperature resistance, etc.; enables the possibility to obtain real-time information about the physical items involved in the process; improve the production efficiency and reduce the production cost; allows the production system to be more decentralized and flexible; provides capabilities for enhancing the calibration process of a system.

Introduction

In a manufacturing system the need for calibration appears when the system is installed for the first time or in response to a change Into an intelligent system the calibration process is desired to be completely automatic It may include:

The discovering of the production facilities The discovering of services and requests for each production facility The building of a map containing the positions and the optimum routes among the system devices

Our paper is focused on an RFID-based solution to automatically determine the positions of the production facilities contained in a manufacturing system and connected by conveyor belts.

Related work

The Agile Assembly Architecture

Developed in the Microdynamic Systems Laboratory of the Carnegie Mellon University The transport of products is assured by 2-DOF (Degree of Freedom) planar robots, called couriers. During the calibration process each courier may perform sensor-based coverage of its workspace, having no a priori information. After a completely workspace coverage, all devices placed in the couriers workspace are detected.

An RFID driven control scheme for production control introduced in [Kamioka et al., 2007]

It is focused in applying the holonic concept to production control in order to lessen the excess production and decrease the lead time

The demonstration environment

It is built around a closed loop Bosch Rexroth conveyor, with three flows. The modular construction of the conveyor allows the system to be easily extended or reconfigured.

Bosch Rexroth conveyor with three flows

The demonstration environment

On each flow a microcontroller-based station is installed, which can read and modify the content of an RFID tag using an RFID tag reader/writer. These stations are called as A, B and C in the figure bellow. The role of each station is to simulate a production facility that can execute one or more operations on a product component.

Flow 3 Flow 2

C
1 0

SW1 IN

A
Flow 1

SW2
0

OUT

Schematic of the system

The demonstration environment

The microcontroller-based stations and the switch controllers are network connected and can communicate with a central PC.

Hardware architecture of the microcontroller-based stations

The calibration process

It is consisting of two phases:

1.

2.

In Phase 1 each production facility controller and switch controller communicates to a central manager information about its services and receives an address to be uniquely identified in the system Phase 2 concerns the building of a system map by determining the positions of each production facility and conveyor switch.

The proposed solution for Phase 2

A component with an RFID tag attached is loaded at the conveyor input and transported through all of the conveyor routes. All production facilities and conveyor switches must write their addresses in the transponders memory, together with the writing time.

Flow 3 Flow 2

C
1 0

B
SW2 (0)

t1
B

t2
SW1 (0)

t3
C

t4
SW1 (1)

t5
SW2 (1)

t6
A

t7
SW1

SW1 IN

A
Flow 1

SW2
0

OUT

a) Schematic of the system

b) The track of the discovering component

The proposed solution for Phase 2

Based on the collected information a directed weighted graph is built, whose nodes are represented by the production facilities and conveyor switches, and the weight of arcs by the traveling time between nodes.
t t1 1
SW22 SW (0) (0) BB

t2t2
SW1 1 SW (0) (0)

t3t3
CC

t 4 t4
SW1 1 SW (1) (1)

t 5t 5

t6 t6
AA

t7 t7
SW1 1 SW

SW2 2 SW (1) (1)

a)
t5
1

a)

SW2
0

t1 t6

t2

SW1

t3

t7
A

t4

b)
V = {SW2 , B, SW1 , C , A} A = {[ SW 2 , B ], [ SW 2 , A], [ B, SW1 ], [ SW1 , C ], [C , SW1 ], [ SW1 , SW 2 ]} G = (V , A) = ({SW2 , B, SW1, C , A}, {[SW2 , B], [ SW2 , A], [ B, SW1 ], [ SW1 , C ], [C , SW1 ], [ SW1 , SW2 ]})

The information tables

The necessary information for optimum leading product components to the production facilities are contained in three types of tables:

The services table is built in Phase 1 of the calibration process The routing tables are obtained from the system graph, which is built in Phase 2 of the calibration process The status table contains information about the state of production facilities (free, busy, failed, etc.)

The information tables

The services table

contains the operations able to be executed by each system device; is unique for all conveyor switches and allows them to identify the production facilities able to do a certain operation.
Production facility A B C Operations O1, O2 O2, O3 O4

An example of a services table

The information tables

The routing tables

are defined as electronic documents storing the routes to the various nodes, represented by the conveyor switches and production facilities ; are built from the weighted graph by determining the shortest path between a switch and all of the production facilities. are specific to each switch controller
Destination A B C Cost (sec.) 10 10 30 SW Position 1 0 1 Next Hop A B SW1

An example of a routing table for the switch SW2.

The information tables

The status table contains information about production facilities status; is updated

each time a production facility displays a change in its status; periodically, based on internal initiative, to update the time information associated to a certain machine state.

Production facility A B C

Status Busy for 80 s Free Failed

An example of a status table

An example

Let's consider a simple manufacturing system having the configuration presented in figure a). The traveling costs on conveyor routes, expressed in seconds, are given in figure b).

Flow 3 Flow 2

20

C
1 0

SW2
0

10

16

SW1

SW1 IN

A
Flow 1

SW2
0

10
A

12

OUT

a)

b)

An example

Consider the system is able to execute the operations set: O = {O1 , O2 , O3 , O4 } and each production facility is able to execute one or two operations from the set O, according to the following services table.

O4

Flow 3 Flow 2

O2, O3
Production facility Operations O1, O4 O2, O3 O4

C
1 0

A B

SW1 IN

A
Flow 1

SW2
0

OUT

The services table

O1, O4

An example
B

Station B executes the operation O2 to the component and releases it. The services table
Flow 2

Production facility A

Operations O1, O4 O2, O3 O4

Flow 3

The component B arrives at SW2.

C
1

SW1
0

SW2
0

A
Flow 1

A component is loaded at the conveyor input having written onto the attached transponder the operations O2 and O4.

The routing table

Destination A B C Cost (sec.) 10 10 30 SW Position 1 0 1 Next Hop A B SW1

An example
B

TC = t (O4 ) + 80 s TA = t (O4 ) + 30 s
Flow 2

The component arrives at SW2.

Flow 3

TA < TC
SW1
0 1

SW2
0

The component will be directed to A

A
Flow 1

Production facility Production facility A A B B C C

Status Operations Free O1, O4 Free O2, O3 Busy O 80 s for

4

Destination A B C

Cost (sec.) 30 30 8

SW Position 1 1 0

Next Hop SW2 SW2 C

The status table services table

The routing table

Solution improvements

Two improvements may be mentioned for the presented solution:

The selection of the most appropriate production facility able to execute the next operation for a component may be done when the component is introduced in the system or immediately after a production facility ends off an operation. In this case the switch controllers will lead the pallets based only on the address of the production facility which is the destination.

Another improvement is to contract or to reserve the production facility selected to execute an operation for a component This will be an assurance that no other component which arrives first at the production facility can occupy it.

Conclusion and future work

The presented solution has the advantages of a decentralized system with auto configuration capacity in the initial phase and reconfiguration capacity in response to change. The way of production facility selection lead to a certain independency of the components towards the production facilities. A component may be directed to any production facility able to execute the requested operations and is not bounded to a pre-established plan. Future work is concerned in finalizing the practical implementation and in extending the concept for other situations that can occur in a real manufacturing system but which are neglected in this phase.

References

J. Brusey, M. Fletcher, M. Harrison, A. Thorne, S.Hodges, D.McFarlane, AutoID based control demonstration. Phase 2: pick and place packing with holonic control, Cambridge, 2003. J. Hua, H. Sun, T. Liang, Y. Lei, The design of manufacturing execution system based on RFID, Workshop on Power Electronics and Intelligent Transportation System, 2008, pp. 8-11. K. Kamioka, E. Kamioka, and S. Yamada, An RF-ID driven holonic control scheme for production control systems, Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent Pervasive Computing, Korea, 2007, pp. 509-514. D. McFarlane, S. Sarma, J.L. Chirn, C.Y. Wong, K. Ashton, The intelligent product in manufacturing control, in 15th IFAC World Congress, Barcelona, 2002. R. Hollis, A. Rizzi, Agile assembly architecture: a platform technology for microassembly, Precision Engineering 19th Annual Meeting, Orlando, 2004. Bosch Rexroth, http://www.boschrexroth.com T. Harju, Graph theory, Department of Mathematics, University of Turku, Finland, 2007.