Deadlock avoidance policies for flexible manufacturing systems: the conjunctive case

Resolving the problem of the manufacturing system deadlock is emerging as a critical issue for effective planning and control in the agile manufacturing paradigm. It turns out that, in most cases, the problem is of nonpolynomial complexity, and its tractability strongly depends on the structure of the resource requests posed by the processed jobs. The authors have previously (1994, 1995) formally analyzed the problem and provided solutions for the special class of FMS where every job requires a single resource unit at every processing stage, namely, a unit of buffer space on the supporting workstation. In this paper, we extend the analysis and one of the previously developed policies-the resource upstream neighborhood (RUN) policy-so that they apply to FMS´s in which every job requires a collection of resources for the execution of a single processing stage