Supervisory Control of a Face Milling Operation in Different Manufacturing Environments

The promise of improved productivity and quality has lead to numerous research investigations in machining process monitoring and control. Recent studies have demonstrated that careful attention must be paid to the regulation of multiple process modules within a single operation such that each module performs its function properly and adverse interactions between modules do not occur. This had lead to the development of supervisory control; particularly to the development of methodologies to systematically construct and implement these controllers. However, no research study has investigated the effect of the production environment on the design of supervisory controllers. In this paper, the design of supervisory controllers for various production environments is studied. The design approach given in Landers and Ulsoy (1998) is applied to construct two supervisory machining controllers that are experimentally implemented in a face milling operation. Comparisons with an experimental implementation without process control illustrate the benefits of utilizing process controllers that are coordinated properly. The results also show that the given design approach may be used to construct supervisory controllers for different types of production environments.