Petri nets and flexible manufacturing

The aim of this survey is to introduce Computer science/Petri nets specialists to the basic system level issues brought up by the development of Flexible Manufacturing and how Petri nets are used to aid the production engineers in their work. After some terminology concerning production engineering, the hierarchical decision and control level is briefly reviewed. Finally, the role and the presence of nets in CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) and in CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) for FMSs (Flexible Manufacturing Systems) are considered. From the design point of view, the use of nets have many advantages in modeling, qualitative analysis, performance evaluation and code generation. From the control of the plant perspective, scheduling on nets models, the coordination of the plant (global and partial) and the presence of nets in the local control level are discussed. Petri nets theory presents a relatively mature body, nevertheless efficient performance evaluation (even for P/T net models) and qualitative analysis of highlevel net models still requires important developments. The Babel-Tower-impression that the Petri net newcomer may have looking at the myriad of so-called high-level-nets formalisms may initially produce some kind of rejection. In any case, it is our opinion that Petri nets appears as a key formalism to describe, analyze and implement the control of FMSs. The merging of Petri nets and knowledge based techniques seems to be very promising to deal with large complex discrete event dynamic systems such as FMSs.