Management and control of information flow in computer integrated manufacturing systems using unified modelling language and Petri nets

In this paper, we develop a systematic design methodology for control modules to manage and control the information flow among existing and new manufacturing application systems in CIM by synthesizing object-oriented modelling and net analysis (petri net [PN]) methods. Due to the importance of objects in managing and controlling information flow, transformation rules from unified modelling language (UML) object dependencies and flows to PN were defined to extend the existing transformation rules between UML activity diagrams and PNs. The goal is to use the configurable graphic interface and the mathematical analysis methods of the PN to verify the logic correctness of the flow control mechanism and then apply the standard modelling and implementation capabilities of UML to transform the control specifications into desired computer codes with specified logic and configuration. The PN models were analysed by performing efficient algorithms that solve recursively corresponding integer programming problems to discover structural errors in the models. This design methodology was then used to build a prototype of the control module for CIM that took into account commercially available computer-aided manufacturing application systems to demonstrate its applicability.