ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the specification and performance evaluation of discrete assembly/non-assembly flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). An FMS is composed of two parts: the physical one, which is composed of the physical resources, and the control part, which determines how to use the physical part in order to organize and optimize the production process. The control part can be split into several levels: Planning, Scheduling, Global coordination, Subsystem coordination and Local control. A timed process algebra called bounded true concurrency (BTC) has been developed from Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) using M. Hennessy's notation. BTC takes into account that the available resources in a system have to be shared by all the processes and is able to consider heterogeneous resources of any type preemptable and non-preemptable, which makes it suitable for specifying FMSs. Once the BAL tool has the system specification, the syntactic analysis following BTC syntax is performed by the BAL tool.
