Section: Scientific Foundations

Themes

Project COSTEAM addresses three complementary themes:

Theme 1: Performance evaluation and systems sizing

The aim of this theme is to evaluate systems producing goods and services in order to design/re-design them or to provide them with efficient management and development strategies. Both generic optimization methods dedicated to common systems and analytical and simulation methods dedicated to more particular systems are addressed in this theme.

Theme 2: Optimal control of systems

This theme deals with designing of controllers for discrete event systems. The control synthesis of discrete event systems including time constraints and the uncontrollable/unobservable nature of some events is addressed. We pay special attention to the notions of deadlock avoidance and recoverable systems for the case of industrial systems. The aim is to build the less restrictive control law which guarantees that the behavior of the system respects given specifications.

Theme 3: Reliability and maintenance systems

This theme deals with the development of efficient maintenance policies in the context of the production of goods or services under strong constraints. The proposed policies are developed by taking into account the production plan and the maintenance plan of the manufacturing system. The main challenge of these topics is the integration of modeling and optimization techniques within a unified analysis process to design and to manage a complex system and then to synthesize its control. We give special attention to modeling of the maintenance activities, starting from the design phase of the manufacturing system.

These three presented thematic intend to provide systems producing goods and services, and more generally enterprise networks, with optimized strategies of control and development. For our case of studies, we do not consider isolated entities, but we take into account the relationships existing between the various partners. Two domains of application will be studied:

• Industrial systems and services systems (such as hospitals). We consider an entity that produces goods or services, taking into account complex constraints as well as interactions with its customers and its suppliers. We propose to develop both analytical methods and generic methods to optimize the behavior of such systems.

• Enterprise networks. On the basis of models developed in the MACSI project, for this kind of application we study the operational management of the whole supply chain with respect to the organization, the monitoring and the optimization of this supply chain. We also propose to consider e-procurement business subject to a certain amount of constraints within the framework of open markets via new technologies of information and communication.