Specification of Reactive Hardware/Software Systems - Electronic ...

378 Case Study
eral (mechanical) machine parameters. This is an expensive and time-consuming task.
In future the configuration of parameters should be automated as much as possible.
To cut costs, advertising companies are going to distribute advertising mail in a personalised
form. This leads to the concept of personalised mail. The current generation of
Buhrs machines is not well equipped to support this form of mailing yet. The requirement
of personalised mail makes the machines substantially more complex. It implies
that each station must be fed with the correct product information at the correct time.
Stations in a line must be able to exchange this product information, but they also have
to be able to process this information in order to perform the correct services for each
mailing packet. A difficult problem that comes with personalised mail is the insurance
of quality. Personalised packets may not get lost. Damaged packets have to be removed
and replaced. Therefore the corresponding personal information has to re-enter the
production line with a request to assemble the same packet again.
To carry out a batch-job the stations of a production line require appropriate personal
information. In general the personal information is supplied by publishers or editors
in the form of pre-printed address labels or in the form of a file of records. Anyway,
the supplied information does not have the correct form such that it can be fed directly
to the production line. The information must first be pre-processed in such a way that
each functional module can perform the correct services at the right time. Since a line
can be configured differently for different batch-jobs, the pre-processing depends on
the settings of the current configuration parameters. A dedicated product information
server is required to perform the personal information pre-processing.
The requirements stated above are summarised in the following list of requirements:
The central control concept must be replaced by a decentralised concept.
The new generation of mailing machines must be realised as a collection of rather
independent and autonomous stations.
Stations are connected as plug-and-play components.
Stations communicate with each other solely through generic interfaces.
Each station has its own intelligence and takes care of its own product transport.
Each station has zero or more plug-and-play interfaces to its functional modules.
A production line must be self-configuring.
A production line must support personalised mail.
Damaged personalised packets have to be removed and replaced.
A mailing machine requires a dedicated product information server.
Notice that this list only contains requirements concerning the difference between the
current generation and the future generation of mailing machines. The requirements of
the current generation of machines are not stated in this thesis.