Fundamental technology for RFID-based supervisory control of shop floor production system

摘要

To improve the leanness of shop floor production system, supervisory control of its production process should be accurate enough so that the state of every product can be tracked in time and its operation can be scheduled correctly. For this purpose, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can be used to acquire accurate production data. This paper reports our research on the fundamental technology for RFID-based supervisory control of shop floor production system, in which production state data are acquired by RFID tags and readers, data communication is realized by programmable logic controller and industrial field bus technology, production process control is implemented by the host computer and material handling devices, and the supervisory control software is developed based on multithread technology. The details of these fundamental technologies have not been reported in existing literatures. A prototype of RFID-based supervisory control system is developed for an experimental manufacturing cell, and some experiments were done to verify the feasibility of these technologies.