An integrated approach for specification and design of automated production systems

The paper focuses on the problem of methods and tools to assist the specification generation, proposal generation and design of automated production systems. The solutions adopted use meta-modeling techniques, web services, hierarchical models, and mechatronic model of plant components integrating four different views of the systems, namely mechanical, electrical, hydro-pneumatic and control ones. For the specification, also the implementation is here discussed, which is based on distributed databases to store the models, and web services and interfaces to remotely access and modify them.