SCHEDULING OF PIECEWISE-CONSTANT PRODUCT FLOWS - A PETRI-NET APPROACH

Scheduling a manufacturing system is usually an NP-hard problem. This means that only heuristic algorithms can be used to provide near-optim al schedules. In this paper, we show that a manufacturing system can b e modeled using a particular type of Petri nets, called Controllable-O utput nets, or CO nets for short. These Petri net models are then used to introduce a two-stage scheduling algorithm for problems in which t he product hows can be considered as piecewise constant. The first sta ge consists of distributing the workload among the resources, The seco nd stage derives a schedule from the resource workload. The determinis tic case is considered. Numerical results are proposed. (C) 1998 Elsev ier Science B.V.