Synthesis, Validation, and Evaluation of Operating Procedures Based on Timed Automata and Dynamic Simulation

Manually generating the operating procedures is often laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone. Because the online sensors may not always be adequate for a designated operation in the plant, the elapsed times of its steps can be stipulated in the activation conditions of a sequential function chart to replace the needed instrument readings. With the timed automata [ Alur, R. ; Theoretical Computer Sci. 1994, 126, 183−235 ] and dynamic simulation, the tasks of synthesizing, validating, and evaluating the operating procedures with insufficient measurements have been systemized in this work. Dividing the operating procedures properly into several stages and setting the reasonable control specifications facilitate the search for specific operation steps. By using the software UPPAAL [ Behrmann, G. ; A Tutorial on UPPAAL. In Formal Methods for the Design of Real-Time Systems; Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg, 2004; pp 200 −236 , Behrmann, G. ; A Tutorial on Uppaal 4.0; Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University: Denmark, 2006], all component automata can be integrated to form a system model and the shortest and/or quickest traces can then be extracted accordingly. These traces can be summarized with the sequential function chart and then verified with Aspen Plus Dynamics. Two examples are presented to validate the proposed approach.