An object-oriented model for the specification of manufacturing systems

The design of advanced manufacturing systems entails a high flexibility in the system specification method, to allow for flexibility and efficiency in coping with the frequent design modifications. Object-oriented specification methods possess the necessary expressiveness and extensibility to allow for such flexibility. In order to obtain a declarative representation of the knowledge of objects, the semantic data model of the frame-based representation method is incorporated. This extended object-oriented model can be used for specifying system behaviors. Within this model, generic object types representing general concepts in manufacturing systems are identified. These generic object types can facilitate the specification of manufacturing systems by means of an object-oriented approach. The application of the model for system specification is illustrated with reference to a typical robotic FMC.