Material Flow Abstraction of Manufacturing Systems

Manufacturing systems integrate electro mechanical components with software to fulfill certain production tasks Due to this combination of computer science and traditional engineering formal models of embedded systems are often inappropriate for the description and analysis of manufacturing systems This is especially prominent on an abstract level where computation and communication are not of primary concern but rather the material the system is processing In this paper, we introduce an abstract formal model of manufacturing systems based on the material flow i e the relation between incoming and outgoing material over time The formalization supports compositional reasoning and the comparison of specifications with more concrete models (implementations) This provides a foundation for the formally founded conceptual modeling of manufacturing systems and the reasoning about the correctness of their realization The former is evaluated by a prototypical tool implementation and a case study