SPECIFICATION AND ANALYSIS FOR AUTOMATED FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING
José Reinaldo Silva, Escola Politécnica, Eston Almança dos Santos, Tiago Vaquero · 2005
The great effort to achieve effective automated manufacturing systems that could also be integrated and flexible lead to the need of a systematic process of shop floor and manufacturing process design with a complete life cycle, that is, where the initial design phases were not neglected. Frequently, the phases concerned with requirement elicitation and analysis were not considered when a technical based product system or even the manufacturing environment is concerned and the process start with a problem definition and goes directly to the design phase. In this work we try to show that an incomplete life cycle is not an answer, neither for the complexity of designing an integrated and flexible manufacturing system nor to face the informality of the first steps of the life cycle of a net production system. On the contrary, the superposition of project phases, as defined by Unified Process practically condemns the incomplete life cycle to finish with incomplete target systems. We propose a way to treat the initial phases of the process, particularly in what concerns production systems, to be represented by XML (as an internal language in the design environment) and to capture and analyses requirements by translating Use Cases, or any of the UML diagrams, to XML and after that to an Extended Petri Net approach called GHENeSys, where it could be properly analyzed based on the desired properties of the net system that results. A specific software tool was produced to handle the process of translation from UML representation to classical or extended Petri Nets approach such as GHENeSys, called itSIMPLE.