Modelling Flexible Manufacturing Systems: A Petri Nets Modular Approach

This paper investigates the use of a graphic notation and a Petri Net (PN) modular approach for the modelling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs). The development and the analysis of complex FMS models can greatly beneet from the automatic synthesis of the complete models and the availability of a graphic tool to describe them in a concise way. The automatic synthesis helps the designer to succeed in the error-prone task of building complex PN models, the graphic representation makes easier to understand them. The paper introduces the graphic notation and describes the use of the modelling approach by means of a working example. Also, we want to point out the importance to obtain a PN model whose structure helps the subsequent analysis and control phases of the system development process. Thus, we show that a deadlock occurence is detected in the PN model obtained in the case study example and that it can be made live by adding control places in a very easy way, because it is recognized to belong to the S 3 PR net subclass.