Ka. Dsouza et Sk. Khator, SYSTEM RECONFIGURATION TO AVOID DEADLOCKS IN AUTOMATED MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS, Computers & industrial engineering, 32(2), 1997, pp. 455-465
Recent demands for small and medium-batch production runs have put add
itional constraints on automated manufacturing systems. Controlling th
e processes in such systems is difficult due to concurrent and asynchr
onous interactions that cause system deadlocks. Deadlocks occur in a s
ystem when a set of concurrent processes becomes interlocked in such a
way that they cannot be completed. This paper reports on the control
of deadlocks in a simple automated manufacturing system consisting of
three workstations arranged around a transporter and process a single
part. Deadlock detection and avoidance were performed off-line and the
system was reconfigured by re-allocating the buffer capacity at the c
ritical workstations. Petri Net formalism was used as the modeling too
l for its ability to model concurrent and asynchronous activities, and
its sound mathematical foundations for analysis. The model was numeri
cally tested on the SUN Workstation under varying operating characteri
stics to study deadlock-free performance and compute effective buffer
capacity at the critical workstations. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Sci
ence Ltd.