Toward verification of material handling systems

Abstract

The correct designing of today's logistic systems has become an increasingly cumbersome process, especially due to their growing sizes and heterogeneities. While simulation methods provide a means to validate the functional behaviour of logistic systems, formal methods allow for proving that the system completely fulfills its specification. This paper presents a novel approach to the formal verification of material handling systems, which is based on setting up material handling system elements that are proven to be correct. The application of the approach is shown using an illustrative example

An approach to the verification of material handling systems

“…With this, requirements to the logistic system can be automatically proven. The paper extends the authors' previous work [13] The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives a brief explanation of model checking, which is the formal technique applied here.…”

“…While in [13] the models of the conveyor and the turntable have been presented, the turntable with priority merge function is discussed in detail in Section 3.2, and the picker is introduced in Section 3.3.…”

On the formal verification of routing in material handling systems

“…This section briefly explains the existing modeling methodology for MHS [8], [9]. The notion of MHS elements is revisited in Section III-A, and then, a description of the MHS network is proposed in Section III-B.…”

“…The variables have a given semantics [8], e.g. the variable Give may only become 1 if the MHS element wants to transfer a cargo.…”

“…However, the approaches mentioned above do not utilize model libraries in order to allow reuse. On the contrary, the authors of this paper introduced a modeling methodology for MHS that allows to apply model checking to verify these systems [8], [9]. The problem with the existing approach is scalability, i.e.…”