Abstract
The bottleneck in creation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) is the development of control software. This paper presents a systematic approach to automate the development of control software for flexible manufacturing cells both at the workstation and cell controller level. Context-free grammars are proposed as the formal basis, and the FMS system is controlled as a byproduct of recognizing the context free grammars. The underlying system architecture, along with the physical, system and functional models are presented for the various components of the FMS. Implementation of the proposed approach is also discussed.