Automated derivation of variants in manufacturing systems design

The Logistics Specification and Analysis Tool (LSAT) is a modelbased engineering tool used for design-space exploration of flexible manufacturing systems. LSAT provides domain specific languages to model a manufacturing system and means to analyze the productivity characteristics of such a system. In LSAT, developers can specify a system and model its deterministic operations as a set of activities. Given a set of activities, it is possible to construct an individual activity sequence that represents one valid system execution, and with minor variations in the specification individual systems can be obtained. To avoid modeling each variant separately, which means cloning and maintaining the common parts, new functionality is needed to deal with the variability of system specifications. In this study, we aim to establish integration between LSAT and product line engineering techniques. Specifically, we provide a realization of a toolchain including variability representation of LSAT realization artifacts and automated variant derivation for the LSAT model variants. Delta modeling, a transformational variability realization mechanism, is employed to model the variability within LSAT realization artifacts. Using the toolchain, we develop an industry-related case for a product line, the so called Extended Twilight System, a Cyber Physical System (CPS) inspired by the CPSs of our industrial partner.