Analysis of the behavior of a manufacturing cell with cyclic feeding policies

The objective of this paper is to obtain a good balance between efficiency and flexibility for flexible manufacturing cells with a cyclic feeding policy. The cell and the part routes are modeled by means of a Petri net. The production policy (resource mapping, Kanban, etc.) is also described by subnets which are merged with the initial net. Operation durations are attached to transitions and delays and/or slack times to places. From this model, a set of constraints denoted by a set of linear equations and inequations are derived. Bounds are then computed by linear programming in order to delimit the wait durations which are consistent with the constraints. An example is presented