Supervisory Machining Control: Design Approach and Experiments

Monitoring and control of machining systems has been shown to dramatically improve operation productivity and part quality; however, very little attention has been given to the coordination of multiple complex machining modules. The current practice is to design the module coordination and to debug the resulting computer code in an ad hoc manner. In this paper, the concept of supervisory machining control, in the context of machining module regulation, is presented. The structure of, and elements contained in, a supervisory controller are detailed, and a systematic design procedure for constructing these controllers is presented. The design procedure is utilized to construct a supervisory machining controller which is experimentally implemented in a face milling operation