An Architecture for Heuristic Factory Control

This paper describes the architecture of YAMS (Yet Another Manufacturing System), a factory control system for flexible manufacturing currently under development at the Industrial Technology Institute. We summarize • some objectives such a system must satisfy, and • its overall architecture. Then we focus on three details of the overall system, • its scheduling strategies, • strategies for moving tools and materials around the factory, and • the bottom elements in the hierarchy, the individual workstations.