A framework to design a distributed diagnosis in FMS

Abstract

When a failure occurs in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS), it is crucial to react quickly in order to maintain the productivity of the system. This requirement leads us to introduce the concept of on-line monitoring. The basic idea is the automation of the procedures of detection, diagnosis and error recovery. In this paper, reasoning mechanisms are proposed for the implementation of an on-line diagnostic system. These mechanisms are based on a distributed processing of symptoms that enables the problem of real-time constraint to be solved. They implement two kinds of reasoning: temporal and an hypothetical.