A deadlock prevention approach for flexible manufacturing systems with uncontrollable transitions in their Petri net models

Deadlocks are a highly undesired situation in a fully automated flexible manufacturing system, whose occurrences are tied to the existence of shared resources that are competed by different production processes. In the last two decades, a fair amount of research has been done on deadlock analysis and control for flexible manufacturing systems, leading to a variety of strategies in the literature. Petri nets are a promising mathematical tool to handle deadlock problems in flexible manufacturing systems. However, most deadlock control policies based on a Petri net formalism assume that all the transitions in a plant model are controllable. However, uncontrollability of events are a natural feature in a real‐world production system. This paper proposes a deadlock prevention policy for a class of Petri nets by considering the existence of uncontrollable transitions. Deadlocks are prevented by adding monitors to a plant Petri net model, whose addition does not inhibit the firings of uncontrollable transitions. Linear programming techniques are employed to find transitions to which a monitor points in order that a more permissive liveness‐enforcing Petri net supervisor can be found. A number of manufacturing examples are used to demonstrate the proposed methods. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society