5th GENERATION : FROM THE TWENTIETH BIRTHDAY OF GRAFCET TO THE GRAFCET OF THE YEAR 2000(1997-20XX)
In 1997 the group organised a presentation stand at EDUCATEC'97 from December 2nd to December 5th, 1997 (CNIT-Paris La Défense) to mark the twentieth birthday of Grafcet. This event gave a complete review of the actions led in Education, Industry, Standardization, and Research and to show the progress made during the last twenty years. In June 1998 an invited session at IFAC INCOM'98 drew attention to foreign laboratories which carry on with researches on Grafcet. The theoretical works on the Grafcet model are increased by taking into account the characteristics of Grafcet in relation to the characteristics of the systems which Grafcet describes the behaviour. In this sense, the current orientations aim at better defining the properties of the frontier separating Grafcet from its environment (interactions by inputs-outputs, typology of these interactions exploiting the definition of both temporal scales, receptivities, actions, events, the taking into account of the semantics of the modelized system as a guide for the elaboration of a Grafcet. In this perspective, it will be very useful to take into account the works led in others subjects, related or not, for the elaboration of the researches on Grafcet. This interest was already demonstrated in the MSR'96 congress where people working on automation and real time systems exposed works quite complementary and convergent on the modelling of reactive systems. In the future, the Grafcet group will certainly imagine other actions of the same kind in order to enable Grafcet to remain a model with a rich past and a promising future.