Title: Manufacturing systems: parallel system models and some theoretical results

Authors: Sanjay Parthasarathy, Steven H. Kim

Addresses: Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. ' Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Abstract: A suitable model of the manufacturing environment must incorporate constructs to represent and manipulate information about concurrency, physical change, and time. The actor model of the manufacturing system is one such model, based on the actor model of computation and the transformation model of production processes. This paper formalises the basic elements of the actor model, which is then used to study the behaviour and capabilities of autonomous production systems. The new approach also offers some interesting insights into the design of completely autonomous production environments. Theoretical results, such as the partial decidability of a general process planning problem, can be derived using the actor model.

Keywords: actor-based manufacturing systems; ABMS; actor model; parallel systems; problem solving; modelling; autonomous production systems; process planning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.1990.062716

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 1990 Vol.3 No.4, pp.225 - 238

Published online: 11 Jun 2014 *

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