In: Computational Intelligence 3, International Symposium, ACM Italian Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, Milan, Italy, September 24-28, 1990, pages 299-309. Amsterdam; New York: North-Holland, 1991.
Abstract: This paper presents a distributed model based expert system, which was developed for automatic control of flexible manufacturing systems. The design of the software architecture was constrained on the one hand by the structure of the target handware, a network of Transputer modes, and on the other hand by the requirement to represent just the main aspects of the underlying technical process, in order to get a real time behaviour. The former point forced to partition the expert system into several loosely coupled expert agents, communicating by message passing. The latter point caused to look for a formal description method, which allows to model the temporal and causal ordering of production steps running sequentially or concurrently. Petri net models were found to be mathematical tools meeting the required constraints