9 An Object - Oriented Approach to the Design of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

In this paper a hybrid top-down/bottom-up method that can be viewed as an extension of the traditional dynamic modeling technique using Petri Nets and Parametric Design is presented as an approach to the design of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. The resulting method supports a clear separation of functionality among the design objects by using the ADV/ADO objectoriented design framework. Thus, the designs as well as the general functional models can be reused. Comparing the method described in the paper with the object-oriented architecture introduced and employed in the PEER object-oriented database system suggests an implementation approach which can support the object clustering properties of ADV's and ADO's.