Exploiting Specification Modularity to Prune the Optimization-Space of Manufacturing Systems

In this paper we address the makespan optimization of industrial-sized manufacturing systems. We introduce a framework which specifies functional system requirements in a compositional way and automatically computes makespan optimal solutions respecting these requirements. We show the optimization problem to be NP-Hard. To scale towards systems of industrial complexity, we propose a novel approach based on a subclass of compositional requirements which we call constraints. We prove that these constraints always prune the worst-case optimization-space thereby increasing the odds of finding an optimal solution (with respect to the additional constraints). We demonstrate the applicability of the framework on an industrial-sized manufacturing system.