Looking for a suggestion

I have 16 Stations, all individual on a conveyor system. Each has its own controls, faults, etc... One of my stations is a Glue Apply. The glue cure time is a few seconds, lets say 2-3 seconds. Conveyor index is 1.0 second, which i can get faster. I'm looking for either an AOI, or another option to know when to Start the Glue Apply cycle based of the last station running or a time within the last station running. Reason being is the next station is where the machine folds or bends the tabs to be held for the start of the Compression Stage.

I was thinking of having a counter 1-16 (that cycled thru and repeated), that every time a station finished its cycle time to remove that individual number from the counter. This would narrow down the last station, which i could do indirect addressing to start the Glue Apply Cycle. I know I'm not re-inventing the wheel here, so open for suggestions.
 
It's assumed you have a control system here - so unclear why you need a cyclic 16 stage counter.
Or do you have 16 control systems, one for each station but no overall control ?

Perhaps you can provide futher details with a sketch.
 
It's assumed you have a control system here - so unclear why you need a cyclic 16 stage counter.
Or do you have 16 control systems, one for each station but no overall control ?

Perhaps you can provide futher details with a sketch.
i have overall machine control, which trickles down to individual station control. This allows me to turn off stations when not needed, also individualizes the faults so i don't shut down the entire conveyor from running, only that individual station. Once each station has ran its cycle and is at home, I index the conveyor at 0.6 seconds. So I'm looking for suggestions on when to start the glue cycle based off the last station that is about to finish before I index, which allows my glue cure time to be the longest.
 
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