Design and analysis of automated manufacturing systems with roles: an object-oriented approach

Manufacturing systems for factory automation are large-scale in which enormous amount of data and operations are involved. In order to investigate the underlying principles of such systems, appropriate specification and modeling tools which can facilitate qualitative analysis involving complex and/or dynamic data and relationships are essential. This paper describes an object-oriented approach that we have been investigating for this purpose. Advanced features embodied by dynamic role facilities have been introduced into a conventional object-oriented model, which facilitates specifying and modeling such applications in a natural, incremental and systematic way. With the analysis based on the communications among different roles, we can have further information about their activeness, which is useful for the high-level design and analysis of a manufacturing system