A new Requirements Engineering approach for Manufacturing based on Petri Nets

Abstract

Manufacturing systems are going through strategic changes to move from current massive customization production process towards new digital models - also called Industry 4.0. Process planning for this new approaches demand artificial intelligent and requirements modeling that should be formally verified. Therefore, requirements for manufacturing - eventually distributed - processes should be formalized and analyzed to lead to effective smart solutions. Goal-oriented requirements appear as a suitable approach to requirements but still need a formal representation that could deal with discrete distributed plants. Finding such representation is a key issue to model and verify requirements. This paper presents a method and a framework to put together goal-oriented requirements and Petri Nets, as an alternative to the requirements for manufacturing systems capable to deal with digital twins. A classic example associated to a car manufacturing plant is also presented to illustrate the method.