Fault Tolerant Analysis For Holonic Manufacturing Systems Based On Collaborative Petri Nets

Uncertainties are significant characteristics of today’s manufacturing systems. Holonic manufacturing systems are new paradigms to handle uncertainties and changes in manufacturing environments. Among many sources of uncertainties, failure prone machines are one of the most important ones. This paper focuses on handling machine failures in holonic manufacturing systems. Machine failure will reduce the number of available resources. Feasibility analysis need to be conducted to check whether the works in process can be completed. To facilitate feasibility analysis, we characterize feasible conditions for systems with failure prone machines. This paper combines the flexibility and robustness of multi-agent theory with the modeling and analytical power of Petri net to adaptively synthesize Petri net agents to control holonic manufacturing systems. The main results include: (1) a collaborative Petri net (CPN) agent model for holonic manufacturing systems, (2) a feasible condition to test whether a certain type of machine failures are allowed based on collaborative Petri net agents and (3) fault tolerant analysis of the proposed method.