On deadlock control for a class of generalised Petri net models of flexible manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper develops a deadlock prevention policy for a class of Petri nets that can model flexible manufacturing systems with assembly and disassembly operations. Siphons in a plant Petri net model are divided into elementary and dependent siphons according to the linear dependency of their characteristic T-vectors. The proposed approach is to make every siphon satisfy the controlled-siphon property (the cs-property), i.e., at any reachable marking, any siphon is max-marked, so that no deadlock states can be reached. The satisfiability of the cs-property is achieved by explicitly adding a monitor for each elementary siphon. The max-controllability of a dependent siphon is ensured by properly supervising its elementary siphons. More permissive behaviour of the non-blocking supervisor is obtained through the rearrangement of the output arcs of the monitors. Compared with existing policies reported in the literature, the advantage of the present method is that a small number of monitors are added and the iterative computing process is accordingly avoided. Finally, the application of the proposed method to an FMS example is presented.