Deadlock detection and recovery in flexible production systems with multiple capacity resources

Flexible production systems exhibit a high degree of resource sharing which can lead to deadlock situations. Since deadlocks are highly undesirable, it is necessary to adopt recovery or avoidance policies to resolve such situations. This paper introduces a graph-theoretic approach for deadlock detection/recovery in production systems with multiple capacity resources. The method uses a digraph that, owing to its transparent meaning, characterizes the deadlock occurrence efficiently. A case study illustrates the method that appears also suitable for real-time applications