Supervisory movement coordination in pipeless chemical plants

Abstract

Pipeless chemical plants provide an alternative way for flexible, scalable, and reconfigurable production of high valued chemical products on demand. The main feature of these pipeless plants is that the raw materials needed for production are transferred in the system by means of automated guided vehicles. Given recipes that describe the production of the desired products, the supervisory control problem is to coordinate the movement of the vehicles such that all recipes are successfully completed on time. To safely coordinate the movement of the vehicles, we propose to employ supervisory coordination. To validate timeliness and reliable completion of the recipes, we propose multiple alternatives relying on formal verification using timed and stochastic model checking.