Specification and coordination of a flexible manufacturing system

The growing demand for performance and flexibility in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) makes their modeling design increasingly more complex. For this reason it is important to have tools which are adequate to the task. The use of recursive processes is particularly suited to modelling concurrent systems due to the inherent modular and algebraic structure which makes the bottom-up and top-down synthesis design feasible. In this paper we apply a structured modelling design technique developed by Spathopoulos and De Ridder (1992, 1994) using communicating or finitely recursive processes. This way of modelling and specification is especially suited due to the possibility of directly realising control systems on the basis of the constructed model.