The use of finite state machines for task-based machine tool control

Nowadays machine tool control, for small batch sizes, suffers from a lack of flexibility at machine level. The paper proposes a new architecture for machine tool control based on two concepts to increase the flexibility: decentralisation of planning and monitoring towards machine tool control, and the replacement of the traditional ISO-based input format by a task-based data representation. The decentralised planning and monitoring functionalities are grouped into the planning and monitoring module. The implementation of this module is based on a finite state machine (FSM). The use of an FSM offers the possibility to model the planning and monitoring knowledge.