Formalizing Material Flow Diagrams

Robert-Jan Bijl

Introduction

• The Falcon Project• Vanderlande Industries

• Embedded Systems Institute

• Material Flow Diagrams• ‘building plans’ for distribution centers

• give an idea of the material flow through setup

• purely pictures, mostly in Visio

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Project Goals

• Formalize MFD’s to be able to derive artifacts from these MFD’s• create a metamodel

• create tooling

• derive artifacts from the created models

• Get insight in the involved processes• design of metamodels

• evolution of metamodels (when already in use)

• creation/availability of tooling

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General Approach

• Analyze the domain• Get domain specific structures

• Get domain specific constraints

• Create metamodel• Implement metamodel

• Choose a framework

• Create tooling to support MDD• Model editor

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Analyze Domain

• Levels of abstraction• Hierarchies• Connections and connectors

• Create model element per connection

• Can be used for e.g. computing metrics

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Create Metamodel

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Implement Metamodel

• We use the Eclipse Modeling Framework• Eclipse based framework for Model Driven Engineering

• Consists of several plug-ins, to• create (meta)models

• perform Model-to-Model transformations (ATL)

• do code generation (Xpand)

• create graphical editor (GMF)

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Implement Metamodel (cnt’d)

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Create Tooling

• Graphical Editor• To be able to create models in a graphical way

• Test Suite• Some (metamodel-independent) models, to test M2M

transformation and code generation on

• Metric Suite• generates statistics for models/transformations

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Graphical Editor

• Compared a few available tools

• Based on five metrics

• Results:

• Decided to go with GMF, best compatibility with what we already have

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Graphical Editor (cnt’d)

• Created a (basic) graphical editor for the metamodel we saw a few slides back

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Practical Application

• Warehouse Simulator• Created by Jacques Verriet of ESI

• Simulates throughput, latency

• Generate input, based on the MFD• Uses some ‘hacks’ to generate exact positions

• Nice example of what is possible

• Combination of Java and Xpand• Read diagram files to create a layout model

• Traverse model to generate simulator input

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Everything in one simple image

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Further Steps

• Finishing my thesis• Trying to ‘draw’ a real-life transport system and

feeding the simulator with input• Graduating

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