Production Modelling as Shell Programming: Concurrency and Delegation

 We show how to build and execute models of concurrent/distributed production cells using some of the Unix system tools, in particular for text processing (Awk), process management (Bash) and information exchange (Mail). We use text files to represent the state of a cell, implement production operations as text-transformations, compose such operations into one or several processes for their sequential/concurrent execution, and allow remote processes (located in different cells) to communicate with each other by emails. The models are higly configurable, able to represent assembly lines, flexible manufacturing systems, even virtual organizations. We also formalise them in a specification language, to achieve abstraction and implementation-independence. A simple case study illustrates the presentation.