An extended unified framework for the rapid development of automated manufacturing systems

Abstract

The design of today's manufacturing systems involves the integration of specialised components with specific properties and functionality. Indeed, it has been a formidable task for the manufacturing community to develop a useable system economically with enhanced efficiency. In view of the technological advances in developing complex manufacturing systems, a unified framework had been proposed by the authors of this paper to formalise the procedures for the development of such systems. This paper presents an extension to this framework that automates the simulation of system behaviour at the design level. This extended framework incorporates a frame-based representation of the abstract classes that are generated from the unified framework, so that an expert system shell can be used to generate the expected behaviour of higher level designs prior to subsequent developments. The advantages of the extended framework include a shortened cycle for the product design and greater ease for system designers to produce manufacturing systems that better conform to their original specifications. A pharmaceutical system is chosen as a case example to illustrate the extended framework's capability. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.