A Distributed Control Approach to Automated Manufacturing Systems With Complex Routes and Operations Using Petri Nets

The development of efficient solutions for deadlock problem in large-scale automated manufacturing systems (AMSs) is an issue of increasing interest in the scientific community, largely because of the nonapplicability of most existing approaches as AMS grows in size. Furthermore, much of these approaches is focused on systems with either assembly operations or flexible routes, implying that generalizing these existing results to more complex systems is difficult. As a result, we initiate on the deadlock problem of AMSs embedding assembly operations in flexible routes. By modeling AMSs as Petri nets, an innovative distributed approach is developed in this paper, which can be realized in an online, look-ahead, and dynamic way without requiring external and extra information. Beyond the value of the presented results, this paper is also intended to develop more general results which will be adaptable to a broader class of AMSs.