Designing transitory routing controllers for hybrid plants

Abstract

We describe a generic routing controller for nonlinear flow shops, and the respective design and verification tool based on coloured timed Petri nets. The design methodology integrates logical and performance-related control for discrete event systems by introducing a time invariant process V. V stands for the cycle time of a repetitive production system and for the stationary sequence of transport and move operations. Application site is a complex plant with 26 sequential/parallel workstations and process plans of 28 operations including multiple loops. The transport system is the bottleneck resource performing as a non-linear GMEC (general mutual exclusion constraint) on plant behaviour