Specification and synthesis of control software for flexible manufacturing systems

The paper deals with automated task programming of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). The method presented allows a) to progressively specify the operations to be performed in an FMS and b) to automatically synthesize the core of highly concurrent control software. During the specification phase tasks are modeled as Petri net modules; the analysis of properties is performed in each step of the design process. During the synthesis phase the tasks are defined and the mechanisms of communication, synchronization and mutual exclusion are built into the pertinent task bodies. This technique is presented and illustrated through an example where Ada code is generated.