Contract-collaboration network method for modeling manufacturing resource control workflows

This paper presents contract-collaboration network (CC-Net) method that is developed to model manufacturing resource control workflows. The CC-Net is an object-oriented class diagram. It depicts the contract-collaboration relationships among the classes in a manufacturing system, with constraints. The CC-Net method uses a primitive modeling block called collaboration module by which the CC-Net is established systematically. This idea is very similar to that of the Lego® block toy. Unlike most workflow modeling methods, the CC-Net method views workflow modeling as a constraint satisfaction process. That is, describing the set of constraint recovery rules corresponding to the constraint violations is regarded as workflow modeling. The obtained set of workflow rules is free from process deadlock and considers all the events of triggering the workflow. We explore the use of the CC-Net method for the workflow modeling of a flexible manufacturing system.