Book excerpt: 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. - Covers both analog and digital control using P/PI/PID controllers and discrete logic control using ladder logic diagrams and programmable logic controllers - Contains a brief introduction to model predictive control, adaptive control, and neural net control - Covers control from the device/process level up to and including the production system level - Contains an introduction to manufacturing systems with the emphasis on performance measures, flow-line analysis, and line balancing - Contains a chapter on equipment interfacing with a brief introduction on OLE for process control (OPC), the GEM standard, fieldbuses, and Ethernet - Material is based on a course with a lab project developed and taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology - Coverage is at the introductory level with a minimal amount of background required to read the text