Despite intensive research on the theoretical aspects of the control of flexible manufacturing workcells, modeled as discrete-event systems (DES), relatively little research has been reported on the implementation of DES-based supervisory controllers. The primary objective o f this thesis was therefore:​ the development and verification of a generalized implementation methodology, for the automatic supervisory control of workcells, that integrates recent theoretical advances in DES theory with state-of-the-art industrial automatic-control hardware.

A secondary objective was to verify the proposed methodology via the implementation of a previously developed prototype supervisory controller, and only tested via computer simulation.

Extensive experiments permitted the successful simultaneous verification o f both objectives of the thesis:​ the generalized implementation methodology successfully links theory and application by demonstrating how supervisory controllers developed within a formal theoretical framework can be applied to an actual system.