A heuristic algorithm to minimise the control places of a Petri net for the control of shared machines

Abstract

This paper proposes a design methodology of a controller based on a Petri net for the shared machines of manufacturing systems. A conflict occurs when several manufacturing systems require the same shared machines at the same time. In this case, we have two issues; the scheduling of jobs on shared machines and the construction of a control procedure for scheduling. The scheduling of production on machines has been extensively studied over the past years by researchers. In this paper, our concern is not the scheduling problem but the construction of a control procedure for the production schedule. We propose a design of a Petri net based controller for the shared machines of manufacturing systems such that the number of control places in the Petri net is minimised. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than an upper bound in terms of optimality. Also, the proposed algorithm is computationally more efficient than the optimal algorithm. Finally, we present the application of the proposed algorithm to a realistic batch process system shown in the literature.