Design and control of manufacturing systems: an integrated approach based on modal logic and zonecharts

Abstract This paper proposes an integrated approach to the design and control of dynamic systems drawing on concepts from modal logic, Petri nets, zonecharts, and object-oriented programming. The use of decision rules to reason about systems models is enhanced by procedures for developing and manipulating these models. One component of the integrated approach is the notion of condition/event (C/E) nets from the theory of Petri nets. Another component is the concept of zonecharts, which is developed using C/E net concepts. The composite methodology allows for high-level system descriptions in the form of partial orderings among the elementary processes of the system. These partial orderings are encoded into C/E incidence matrices and manipulated by a partial process planning algorithm. The algorithm is shown to be efficient. It also serves as an implementation technique for the bilevel knowledge-based control scheme proposed earlier by the authors.