7. Optimal Real-Time Management for Automated Production Lines

Today manufacturing is highly decentralized from the company headquarters to local Production sites, taking advantages from local resources such as labor costs, raw materials, infrastructures, etc. Economic scale factors motivate the implementation of large scale plants. These huge plants imply great number of distributed production lines. The decentralized environment increases the need for complex management tools that enable the complete on-line system supervision and control. This chapter presents an optimal real-time management system for automatic production plants, that incorporates low-level communications between processes—PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers), a centralized optimization and supervisory tool that manages the entire system and remote communication between system’s administrator and production processes (internet, GSM mobile communications, …). This concept is a two layer management architecture where inner loops are performed by PLC networks and the outer optimization loop is performed by a SCADA system (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), combined with complex mathematical tools that enable the system to run real-time complex computational algorithms to optimize the hourly target production.