A formal technique for the specification and verification of distributed systems and its application in manufacturing automation

A methodology for specifying and verifying distributed systems is presented. The CRIS language, based on communicating extended finite state machines, is used in the specification of systems under development. The verification technique uses heuristic information on the specification objects (machine states, variables, FIFO queue contents and exchanged messages in the communication ports), for driving the reachability graph generation, used for checking properties of interest. A Flexible Assembly Cell (FAC) is used as a case study for a manufacturing system. Some results on the applicability of this approach to the FAC specification and verification are discussed.