The Eclipse LSAT™ project provides a toolkit for the early design of (mechatronics-intense) flexible manufacturing system development adhering to the MBSE paradigm. It enables the specification of the system and product flow in the system and analysis of the associated impact on system resources. The tool suite supports the early design of flexible manufacturing system development, by shortening the development time using light-weight models for logistics at an appropriate abstraction level. This provides value when dealing with unclear requirements, many design decisions, and when it is difficult to give estimates of the performance that can be achieved and / or guaranteed. Its analysis is used to give guarantees on safety and optimize performance. It includes support of formal specification for unambiguous communication, and design-space exploration and analysis techniques to assess and optimize the performance of system behavior scenarios.
The toolkit’s core feature is a set of four formal languages to model flexible manufacturing systems, providing an intuitive textual syntax combined with a graphical syntax:
- Machine language: modelling of system resources, peripherals, actions that the peripherals can execute, as well as the resource positions and motion trajectories;
- Settings language: physical settings of the system, including coordinates, execution times, and motion profile parameters;
- Application language; description of the system behavior at a higher level of abstraction using activities that are composed of a set of actions and their dependencies;
- Logistics language; order of activities to capture the possible and/or required product flows.
The semantics of the languages are captured in sound mathematical structures, that allow formal analysis. The toolkit supports:
- Modelling to realize a consistent specification (of physical layout and allowed behavior) and design-time feedback including syntax checks and domain validation;
- Visualizations providing human understanding including Gantt charts, activities, motion paths;
- Timing analysis providing insights including max-plus linear model-based techniques to calculate the makespan and throughput, to identify bottlenecks and critical paths, and to support design-space exploration (impact of layout changes, scheduling);
Code generation: offline and runtime conformance checking, i.e. validation whether the existing implementation conforms to the specification.
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