Distributed manufacturing control systems, such as Holonic Control Systems (HCSs), are difficult to apprehend and to design, due to the presence of many autonomous, concurrent and asynchronous activities. A formal specification methodology allowing to understand, to synthesise the system specifications and to validate the correctness of their models would play a key role in its design and later in its implementation. This paper presents an approach to the formal specification of HCSs based on high-level Petri nets. The proposed approach is tested in the specification of the ADACOR HCS.
['Paulo Leitão', 'Armando W. Colombo', 'Francisco Restivo']
A formal specification approach for holonic control systems: the ADACOR case