Application of object-oriented modeling tools to design the logic control system of a packaging machine

The work presents the results of an application of object-oriented modeling techniques to design manufacturing systems logic controllers. In particular, the semantical aspects of specification languages like UML and Statecharts, widely used in many software engineering methods, are analysed and discussed, with regard to their adequacy for the industrial domain and their verification with formal methods. The paper ends with the description of a practical case of study, which shows that the proposed design and verification techniques can be successfully adopted in a real industrial framework, given domain-specific adaptation of object-oriented modeling languages.