RESOLVING DEADLOCKS IN FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING CELLS

Considered is a flexible manufacturing cell with a central buffer of f inite room and a material handling device of unit load capacity. Deadl ock occurs when various products with different routings compete for a finite number of resources. Proposed are two real-time control algori thms to resolve deadlocks. One algorithm follows the deadlock detectio n/recovery strategy, while the other avoids a deadlock state. It is sh own empirically that the latter one results in a better performance of the cell than the former. Both algorithms require a small amount of o n-line information and are applicable under a wide variety of conditio ns.