A functional-to-behavioural transformation framework for specification and design of manufacturing systems

Abstract

To maximize the productivity, quality and safety of operators, design and dependability analysis tools must be integrated as soon as possible in the lifecycle of automated manufacturing systems (AMS). As a concurrent approach, the structured analysis and design technique (SADT) can be efficiently used for such integration. SADT is a graphic notation for system specification and requirement analysis that is well adapted to describe the functions and their interconnection in a manufacturing systems. In spite of its advantages, SADT is limited by the lack of a formal foundation, which makes it necessary to extend it by a mathematical behavioural model such as the Petri net. This article first proposes an approach for the automatic generation of the Petri net model corresponding to SADT specifications, thus allowing a direct simulation of the SADT model to validate its behaviour. The complexity and non user-friendly interface of such a Petri net have led us to propose a temporal SADT whose primitives represent abstract types for the underlying Petri net model. This temporal SADT has the merits of both the SADT and Petri nets, since it adds to the user friendliness of SADT, the foundation of Petri nets.