Qualitative knowledge-based modeling of manufacturing systems

Modern manufacturing systems exhibit flexibility, autonomy, and intelligence - properties that are hard to model. Nevertheless modeling such systems is important for development, control, and analysis tasks. This article presents a new intelligent modeling methodology for reactive manufacturing systems, representing the structure, behavior, and functionality of such systems, and emphasizing the cause-effect relations between the components. The building blocks of the modeling approach are activities, information items that how among the activities, and rules governing the behavior of the activities. The modeling methodology presented supports various types of analysis important to manufacturing systems, such as reachability, backward connectivity, and rules' consistency.