Model-Predictive Controllers for Performance Management of Composable Conveyor Systems

Composable Conveyors expose fundamental new problems that must be addressed as the nation transforms its advanced manufacturing infrastructure. Unanticipated fluctuations in workloads caused by the increasingly open and interconnected advanced manufacturing systems makes it significantly challenging to appropriately configure and adapt the operating parameters of conveyor systems that are deployed at individual plants such that reliability and desired quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are met. Moreover, these must not be tightly coupled to a single layout but work seamlessly after the conveyor layouts change. To address such challenges, this paper describes different controller design strategies and compares each approach against a baseline system without any controller.