Deadlock Prevention and Deadlock Avoidance in Flexible Manufacturing Systems using Petri Net Models

Deadlocks constitute an important issue to be addressed in the design and operation of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). In this paper, we show that prevention and avoidance of FMS deadlocks can be implemented using Petri net models. For deadlock prevention, we use the reachability graph of a Petri net model of the given FMS, whereas for deadlock avoidance, we propose a Petri-net-based online controller. We discussing the modeling of the General Electric FMS at Erie, PA. For such real-world systems, deadlock prevention using the reachability graph is not feasible. We develop a generic, Petri-net-based online controller for implementing deadlock avoidance in such real-world FMSs