Manual synthesis of cyclic operating procedure in a realistic system is widely regarded as a difficult task since it is both time-consuming and error-prone. It is thus desirable to develop a systematic approach to automatically generate the optimal schedule of operation steps so as to achieve one or more specific production goal. The timed automata are utilized in the present work for such a purpose. In particular, all components in a given system and the corresponding control specifications are characterized with automata according to the proposed modeling rules. By using parallel composition, a system automaton can be produced with these models and the most appropriate operation path can then be identified accordingly. For any practical application, a sequential function chart and the corresponding Gantt chart can also be easily extracted from this path. Three examples are presented in this paper to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. (C) 2013 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.