Towards a Functional Formalism for Modelling Complex Industrial Systems

Towards a Functional Formalism for Modelling Complex Industrial Systems

This paper is devoted to the presentation of the main lines of an unified functional formalism for modelling complex industrial systems, that is to say systems that typically mix a big number of different software and physical devices. Our approach is based on a discrete non standard representation of time. It captures both the hierarchical architecture and the temporal and data multi-scale str...

Towards a Modelling Formalism for Conflict Management and for Sociocybernetics

Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems

We present a broad extension of the conventional formalism of state machines and state diagrams, that is relevant to the specification and design of complex discrete-event systems, such as multi-computer real-time systems, communication protocols and digital control units. Our diagrams, which we call statecharts, extend conventional state-transition diagrams with essentially three elements, dea...

A Unified Formalism for Complex Systems Architecture

Complex industrial systems are typically artificial objects designed by men, involving a huge number of heterogeneous components (e.g. hardware, software, or human organizations) working together to perform a mission. In this thesis, we are interested in modeling the functional behavior of such systems, and their integration. We will model real systems as functional black boxes (with an interna...

Emergence and Complex Systems – towards New Practices for Industrial Automation?

There exist various complex systems theories. Common to these ideas is that they construct fancy abstractions about complexity – so fancy that it is difficult to see the underlying domain fields any more. However, there will not exist applications of the theories if the abstractions cannot be concretized. This paper tries to show that something practical can really be reached: New approaches an...