A Petri net approach to stability analysis of buffer priority scheduling policies in manufacturing systems

System stability is an important criterion in selecting an appropriate control or scheduling policy for re-entrant line systems. Traditionally, stability analysis was based on the concept of time boundedness and was studied using Foster´s criterion, which is a special case of stochastic Lyapunov functions. We emphasized the concept of buffer boundedness as an alternative criterion for characterizing the stability of scheduling policies and analyzed the stability of re-entrant line systems using this concept. A Petri net based framework was introduced to represent the dynamic behavior of re-entrant line systems. The Petri net method has been shown to be intuitive, simple and efficient