This paper presents a hybrid framework that specifies and characterizes the capabilities of generic components in an automated material handling system (AMHS). The framework also provides rules and mechanism for binding these capabilities together so as to facilitate the process of task planning for AMHSs. As a hybrid framework, the formal mathematics of Communicating Sequential Process (CSP) is tightly integrated to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to provide three important entities, namely, the object structure diagram, object communication diagram and CSP-based statechart to extend the capability of a UML model in specifying the key properties of AMHSs including synchronization, parallelism and communication. The results will bring us a step closer to the generation of a fully automated task-planning executive for AMHSs.
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