The need to reduce manufacturing costs, while maintaining higher qualities, have led to improvements in the configuration of manufacturing systems as well as improvements in their control. Flexible manufacturing workcells (FMCs) have been commonly used for the production of wide-variety but low-volume products. Furthermore, with the utilization of re-configurable virtual flexible manufacturing workcell (VFMC) configurations the efficiency of these systems has been increased.

FMCs have been historically modeled as discrete-event systems (DES). Despite intensive research on the theoretical aspects of the control of FMCs (and VFMCs), relatively little research has been reported on the implementation of DES-based supervisory controllers. Therefore, the primary objective of this thesis is the development of a generalized implementation methodology that allows the supervisory control of VFMCs using programmable logic controllers (PLCs), based on ExtendedMoore Automata (EMA) and Ramadge-Wonham Controlled-Automata theories, utilized in our laboratory.