DEADLOCK-FREE SCHEDULES FOR AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING WORKSTATIONS

Scheduling automated, unmanned manufacturing systems is significantly different from traditional job shops where human prescence is implicit ly assumed, Deadlocking has been identified as one of the critical pro blem in the control of automated manufacturing systems, Past approache s have been myopic in the sense that deadlock avoidance and recovery h ave been treated as run time problems of the system, In this paper, fo rmulations for deadlock-free schedules are proposed and the importance of considering both material handling and buffer space availability w hile scheduling such an automated workstation are discussed. Extension s to the basic model and solution methods are also presented.