Title: On deadlock prevention in case of failures in flexible manufacturing systems

Authors: Zhi Wu Li, Wei Ding, Rong Ming Zhu

Addresses: School of Electro-Mechanical Engineering, Xidian University, No. 2 South Taibai Road, Xi'an 710071, PR China. ' School of Electro-Mechanical Engineering, Xidian University, No. 2 South Taibai Road, Xi'an 710071, PR China. ' School of Electro-Mechanical Engineering, Xidian University, No. 2 South Taibai Road, Xi'an 710071, PR China

Abstract: Abrupt failures of equipment in flexible manufacturing systems are modelled by Petri nets, which can describe the behaviour of malfunctioned equipment such as failure, recovery and rework with failure places, failure and recovery transitions. On the basis of such a modelling technique, a new deadlock prevention policy is developed, which controls elementary siphons only and makes dependent siphons P-invariant controlled by adjusting control depth of additional control places. The structure of the resultant supervisors can be greatly simplified due to the fact that only elementary siphons need to be explicitly controlled.

Keywords: deadlock prevention; Petri nets; siphons; flexible manufacturing systems; FMS; equipment failure; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2006.008791

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2006 Vol.8 No.1/2/3, pp.58 - 74

Published online: 25 Jan 2006 *

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