The deadlock problem in the control of Flexible Manufacturing Systems: An overview of the Petri net approach

The disparity of Petri net models in the literature for the study of resource allocation problems in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) is overwhelming. Paradoxically, those models often strongly overlap in terms of their modeling capability. Such clustering seems to be impelled by a mature knowledge of results which capsize liveness at the topological level of the FMS for families of models which comply with some properties of good behaviour. Not rarely, such properties are embraced at the expense of severe or inconsistent syntax restrictions paying slight regard to actual modelling requirements in the application domain of FMSs. In this paper, we promote a distillation of the current amalgam of subclasses and tangent results, proposing taxonomic categories that allow capturing the different capabilities of each kind of model and establishing a reference framework for past and future advances.