A framework for failure recovery in a manufacturing cell

The maturity level of an automated manufacturing system can be measured by the failure-recovery capability of the system. This paper addresses the unique characteristics of failure-recovery problems in manufacturing cells, suggests a framework to cope with the problems, and presents a recovery strategy. Opportunistic and incremental problem-solving concepts of a blackboard architecture are adopted for building the framework. A case-based strategy has been developed, which uses both heuristic knowledge and historical information to resolve the cause of failures in diverse situations. An example of tool breakage is presented which illustrates the concepts of the above-mentioned framework and strategy. Prototype software has been implemented in the object-oriented language Smalltalk-80 for this purpose.