Using model engineering for the criticality analysis of reconfigurable manufacturing systems architectures

Abstract

Reconfigurable manufacturing systems have the ability to evolve in response to a change in their environment or a modification of their composition (after a failure of one of its part for instance). In the first part, this paper introduces a model for the representation of these systems that takes into account the concepts of architecture (the components of the system) and configuration (the relations between the components) and separates the logical part constituted by products from the physical part constituted by resources. An UML representation is proposed for this model. The second part of this article deals with the concept of tolerance and proposes automatic evaluation from the UML representation of the architecture. More precisely, architecture part of the model is derived through model transformation into an analysis model for evaluating the capability of the system to provide its functions in spite of the failure of one of its elements.