An approach to the verification of material handling systems

The development of correctly working logistic systems is a tedious task. On the one hand, the developer is faced with the increasing complexity of systems and shrinking time-to-markets, but on the other hand, the need for reliability and safety of the implemented controls becomes more and more important. Formal verification techniques such as model checking allow for proving whether a system completely fulfills its specification. Existing work, though, considered only the verification of single controllers, but did not analyze the behavior of a complete logistic system. In this paper, an approach to the formal verification of material handling systems is presented. The approach is based on the definition of material handling system elements and their interconnection. Experimental results show that the approach can ensure the correct functionality of logistic systems.