A control perspective on recent trends in manufacturing systems

Many notions from control theory are relevant here, although their specific realization is quite different from more traditional application areas. The standard control theory techniques do not apply: we have not yet seen a manufacturing system that can be usefully represented by a linear system with quadratic objectives. This is not surprising; standard techniques have been developed for what have been standard problems. Manufacturing systems can be an important area for the future of control; new standard techniques will be developed. Some central issues in manufacturing systems include complexig, hierarchy, discipline, capacir):, uncertaing, and feedback. Important notions of control theory include state and control variables, the objective function, the dynamics or plant model, and constraints. It would be premature to try to identify these with all the issues outlined in this paper; it would even go against the purpose of the paper, which is to stimulate such modeling activity. In this section, we describe the relevance of these notions to the manufacturing context for readers whose primary background is in control and systems.