Software development for holonic manufacturing systems

Manufacturing control systems in the future will be facilitated by multi-te chnological solutions, families of products based on some basic sets of sol utions, and updates and configurations for customisation. Exact and verifie d specifications are of key importance when considering the effectiveness o f design work. A study on the software development for a very flexible manu facturing system,'holonic' system is reported here. The overall system anal ysis is guided with well-defined functional architecture, called PEM-modell ing, to provide consistency and cohesion in the system structures. The soft ware development is carried out following the principles of object oriented analysis and design with CASE tools providing methods for exact definition s and fast software development. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.