Growing numbers of engineering graduates are finding employment in the control systems area with applications to manufacturing. To be properly prepared for such positions, it is desirable that the students be exposed to the topics of process control, discrete logic control and the fundamentals of manufacturing. Presently there is no existing textbook and/or reference that combine together process control, discrete logic control and the fundamentals of manufacturing. This is a book that fills that gap.

This book integrates together the theory with a number of illustrative examples. Constructive procedures will be given for designing controllers and manufacturing lines, including methods for designing digital controllers, fuzzy logic controllers and adaptive controllers, and methods for the design of the flow of operations in a manufacturing line. One chapter will be devoted to equipment interfacing and computer communications, with the focus on fieldbuses, device drivers and computer networks. There are no existing control-oriented textbooks that bring this material into the picture, although interfacing and communications are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the overall control problem.