A Contract-based Methodology for Production Lines Validation

The approach we present in this paper exploits assume-guarantee reasoning through contracts to model a production line, and to generate its virtual prototype for efficient and correct plant simulation. Contracts are used to model the different parts composing the line; the modeling is guided by a well-known taxonomy associating industrial machines to manufacturing processes and their elementary actions, each represented by a contract. The composition of contracts representing the actions of a machine specifies each possible manufacturing process implemented by the machine. Then, automatic synthesis from contracts is used to generate an executable model of the machines composing the plant. The generated models are finally integrated into a state-of-the-practice industrial plant simulation software to validate the execution of the production line.The entire methodology is presented by showing its step-by-step application to a concrete scenario.