The Manufacturing System Design requires a clear knowledge of the system and the lnformation System support (qualitative and quantitative) necessary for evaluating and deciding among different design alternatives. A fundamental aspect during the design process is to develop a model which describes the system, with the required detail level, and in a formal, concise and suitable way, in order to study the impact of the decisions on the system performance, before its construction. Among different modeling methodologies applicable to Manufacturing Systems, Object-Oriented Methodology stands out for its capability of representing at once organizational, technological and human aspects involved in a complex production system, and of modeling its dynamic dependencies as well. This paper shows a new way to develop a model using an Object-Oriented Methodology, called RCOO, developed by the IRIS Group of the Universidad Jaume I and the GIP Group of the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, and apply it to develop a Reference Model of a Manufacturing System, that can be used to simulate different alternatives of a particular Manufacturing System. This research work has been sponsored by the CICYT (Comision Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnologia), inside the TAP Project Number 0880.
All articles published by Studies in Informatics and Control (SIC) are published in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).