Challenges in Application of Petri Nets in Manufacturing Systems

Petri nets are a useful mathematical formalism for specification of manufacturing systems, supported by various analysis and verification methods. The progress made in automating control systems and the widespread use of Industry 4.0 pose a number of challenges to their application, starting from the education at university level and ending with modelling of real case studies. The paper aims to present and analyse the most relevant challenges and opportunities related to the use of Petri nets as a modelling technique of manufacturing systems. The review of the literature is primarily based on the years 2019–2020 to reflect the current state of the art. The newest approaches to deadlock prevention and recovering, but also other important analysis problems and difficulties in modelling real industrial processes are discussed. Trends for the future are also identified.

Automatic Supervisory Controller for Deadlock Control in Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems with Dynamic Changes

In reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMSs), the architecture of a system can be modified during its operation. This reconfiguration can be caused by many motivations: processing rework and failures, adding new products, adding new machines, etc. In RMSs, sharing of resources may lead to deadlocks, and some operations can therefore remain incomplete. The objective of this article is to develop a novel two-step solution for quick and accurate reconfiguration of supervisory controllers for deadlock control in RMSs with dynamic changes. In the first step, the net rewriting system (NRS) is used to design a reconfigurable Petri net model under dynamic configurations. The obtained model guarantees boundedness behavioral property but may lose the other properties of a Petri net model (i.e., liveness and reversibility). The second step develops an automatic deadlock prevention policy for the reconfigurable Petri net using the siphon control method based on a place invariant to solve the deadlock problem with dynamic structure changes in RMSs and achieve liveness and reversibility behavioral properties for the system. The proposed approach is tested using examples in the literature and the results highlight the ability of the automatic deadlock prevention policy to adapt to RMSs configuration changes.

One Computational Innovation Transition-Based Recovery Policy for Flexible Manufacturing Systems Using Petri nets

In the third and fourth industrial revolutions, smart or artificial intelligence flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) seem to be the key machine equipment for capacity of factory production. However, deadlocks could hence appear due to resources competition between robots. Therefore, how to prevent deadlocks of FMS occurring is a very important and hot issue. Based on Petri nets (PN) theory, in existing literature almost all research adopts control places as their deadlock prevention mean. However, under this strategy the real optimal reachable markings are not achieved even if they claimed that their control policy is maximally permissive. Accordingly, in this paper, the author propose one novel transition-based control policy to solve the deadlock problem of FMS. The proposed control policy could also be viewed as deadlock recovery since it can recover all initial deadlock and quasi-deadlock markings. Furthermore, control transitions can be calculated and obtained once the proposed three-dimension matrix, called generating and comparing aiding matrix (GCAM) in this paper, is built. Finally, an iteration method is used until all deadlock markings become live ones. Experimental results reveal that our control policy seems still the best one among all existing methods in the literature regardless of whether these methods belong to places or transitions based.