Performance engineering of flexible manufacturing systems using LSAT

Flexible manufacturing systems are characterized by interleaved product flows and shared (production) resources, leading to complex routing of products through the manufacturing pipeline. This makes it challenging to predict performance during the early design phase and to design a safe and optimal product flow. LSAT provides a model-based engineering solution to this challenge. LSAT is a methodology to quickly assess the performance realized by different system designs, by capturing system structure, system behavior, and timing characteristics in a lightweight executable model.

Commercial benefits

LSAT provides the following commercial benefits:

Support contract negotiations

LSAT supports contract negotiations by making system performance requirements explicit.

Reduce risk

The methodology provide early performance guarantees, allowing issues to be identified and addressed at an earlier stage. It also ensures the completeness of system specifications, leading to more reliable and predictable system behavior.

Reduce cost

LSAT helps reduce costs by avoiding the over-dimensioning of systems, ensuring that resources are used efficiently. It also shortens development time by enabling a model-based engineering approach, allowing teams to design and validate systems more quickly.

Technical benefits

LSAT provides the following technical benefits:

Resource interactions modeled explicitly, and shown in Gantt chart

High-level and concise modeling: only model behavior aspects relevant for productivity

Automatically compute schedule and productivity enabled by the precise semantics

Faster design-space exploration to assess impact of design decisions in a structured way

Compare execution logs with model to diagnose issues in the field