Control system architecture for matrix-structured manufacturing systems

Mass customization has in recent years required the manufacturing companies to become more flexible, while sustaining a high production throughput. To address this challenge, Matrix-Structured Manufacturing Systems (MMS) enable high levels of flexibility, scalability, and redundancy. However, current control system architectures do not sufficiently leverage these aspects that MMS enable, resulting in less efficient manufacturing systems. This paper therefore proposes a control system architecture for MMS, designed to leverage these benefits and increase the performance of this manufacturing system. To verify and validate the proposed control system architecture, a company case study with a Danish industrial automation company is presented, yielding potential performance increase and improved flexibility.