NSF Workshop on Logic Control for Manufacturing Systems

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

June 26-27, 2000

Sponsored by NSF and ERC/RMS


Top 10 Challenges in Logic Control for Manufacturing Systems

10. Distributed Control (General management of distributed control applications, Open/distributed control -- ethernet-based control)
9.Theory (No well-developed and accepted theory of discrete event control, in contrast to continuous control)
8.Languages (None of the programming languages do what we need but nobody wants a new programming language)
7.Control logic synthesis (automatically)
6.Standards (Machine-control standards -- every machine is different, Standardizing different types of control logic programming language, Validated standards)
5.Verification (Standards for validation, Simulation and verification of controllers)
4. Software (Software re-usability -- cut and paste, Sophisticated software for logic control, User-unfriendly software)
3.Theory/Practice Gap (Bridging the gap between industry and academia, Gap between commercial software and academic research)
2.Education (Educating students for various PLCs, Education and keeping current with evolution of new control technologies, Education of engineers in logic control, Lack of curriculum in discrete-event systems)
And the number one challenge in logic control for manufacturing systems is...
1.Diagnostics (Integrating diagnostic tools in logic control, Standardized methodologies for design, development, and implementation of diagnostics)

7/10/00 dmt