Modeling and Control Specification of Flexible Manufacturing Systems Using Behavioral Traces and Petri Nets Building Blocks

This paper deals with the definition of a general approach to the modeling and control specification of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. The development and the analysis of complex FMS models can greatly benefit from the automatic synthesis of the complete models and the availability of a graphic tool to describe them in a concise way. The automatic synthesis helps the designer to succeed in the error-prone task of building complex Petri net models or Sequential Functional Charts, while the graphic representation makes easier to understand them. The paper puts together a trace-based formal specification method and a compositional Petri Nets approach with predefined building blocks, leading to a unified framework whose goals are to cope with the complexity of the FMSs behaviours and constraints. The problem of control specification is also considered introducing actions in the behaviour description so that the Sequential Functional Chart specification is also possible.