On Modelling the State-Space of Manufacturing Systems using UML

Motivated by the idea of implementing all degrees of freedom into the field-level automation software of a manufacturing system, this paper presents an approach to develop the space of action of manufacturing systems by means of modelling their state-space. The meta-model of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) is extended for an object-oriented description of machine components. This description contains the operations a machine component is able to execute as well as the preconditions and effects of the operation in relation to the sensors of a component. From the class descriptions of machine components, models of manufacturing plants can be composed. Since the preconditions and effects of a component's operation reference the machine states of the manufacturing system, from these models the state-space of a manufacturing system can be derived.