A specification language for planning and fault recovery in manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper presents the syntax and semantics of a component-oriented rule-based language for specifying the formal models of manufacturing systems. A model captures the state of a component of the system in a set of first-order logic predicates, and it captures the semantics of the operations performed by this component in a set of rules that determine the preconditions and postconditions of an operation. The models are then used to plan the sequence of operations of each class of jobs to be manufactured by these systems. A plan-oriented fault detection and correction strategy is proposed. This strategy can automatically handle any combination of faults that may occur when monitoring the operations of manufacturing systems. A fault-tree is consulted prior to executing the scheduled operations of a plan, and the faults that affect the execution of these operations are handled subsequently. Resuming the original cyclic schedule is attempted, whenever feasible. As a proof of concept, a prototype implementation of both the main constructs of the component-oriented rule-based language and the planning and fault-recovery algorithms presented in this paper have been completed. This prototype is implemented on a Unix-based system in the Ada programming language. The specification of a manufacturing system is first expressed in the proposed language. These statements are then translated into Ada code. This code is next compiled by a Verdix Ada compiler and is executed in order to create and populate the model data structure of the system. A detailed plan of execution and a set of fault-recovery plans may then be derived for a job to be manufactured on this system. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.