Deadlock prevention, deadlock detection and deadlock avoidance strategies are used to solve the deadlock problems of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The conventional prevention policies were always attempt to prevent the system entering the deadlocked situation by using a few control places. On can know that one prohibits the deadlocked markings, some dead markings will be sacrificed. Therefore, the reachability states will become less than the initial net. However, our goal is to preserve all the reachability states of the initial net. Under our control policy, the deadlocks or deadlock zone will be channelized to live markings such that all the dead markings in reachability states will be conserved. Finally, an example is performed and can obtain the maximal permissiveness of a Petri net model. The other examples are all getting the same result. To our knowledge, this is the first work that employs the channelized method to prevent the deadlock problem for FMSs.
