Formal specification of holonic control system ADACOR product holon, using high-level petri nets

Abstract

Holonic manufacturing and multi-agent paradigms are suitable to support the actual challenges of flexible manufacturing systems, due to their decentralisation, modularity and autonomy features. The formal specification assumes a critical role in order to understand and synthesise those complex systems. The Petri nets formalism is adequate to model and validate the dynamic behaviour, but present weak points when the system contains many instances of the same component, since the model grows (structure and components) in a non-controllable manner. The use of high-level Petri nets, allows to reduce this complexity, by compressing the representation of states, actions and events, to overcome the identified limitations and to support more complex and bigger coordination scenarios. We present a formal specification of the ADACOR product holons using high-level Petri nets and the associated formal validation of the model.