A high level specification mechanism for the analysis and design of manufacturing systems

A structured development approach to deriving system models that helps to better understand and represent system details is presented. Real-world systems are never completely designed by either top-down or bottom up approaches. Therefore, methods that allow the integration of these two approaches as well as provide a means for analyzing such models are very useful. First, a general purpose system architecture, a corresponding system specification language, and a broad classification of the various concurrent system activities are presented. Second, Petri net (PN) extensions to simplify system specification and modeling are provided. Third, a transformation between the high level specifications to the proposed PN extensions is provided. Finally, a PN system model using the new PN extensions is derived as an example. To facilitate the use of existing PN based analysis and simulation tools a transformation between the PN extensions used in this paper to classical PNs is also illustrated