Syntactic Models of Manufacturing Processing and Control

This paper describes methods by which manufacturing task description and control may be modelled by a formal string grammar with varying degrees of non-determinism. We first describe the sorts of formal grammars which are useful for these purposes, and provide an introduction to the terminology together with an example of the technique applied to the processing and control decisions made in a commercial production facility. The link between task decomposition and control is modelled by a grammar whose productions may change depending on control decisions, permitting multiple hierarchical decornpositions of high-level tasks. Task strings are embellished into longer strings with sufficient detail to describe the process at the level of concern. Such longer strings are themselves further decomposed until finer atomic tasks are reached.