Modelling, control, and simulation of flexible manufacturing systems through the use of synchronous Petri nets

A flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a complex mechanical system capable of fabrication, machining, and assembly operations. It may be integrated with material-handling equipment and automated storage systems. An FMS control system is a complicated system which supervises and co-ordinates numerically controlled machines, robots, and other types of equipment of the FMS in order to complete the fabrication plan successfully. The FMS study includes the modelling of FMS control, its simulation and its implementation. Currently advanced FMS study tools belong either to Petri nets, function charts-which are modelling tools-or to asynchronous programming languages. This paper presents a new approach to studying FMSs: the synchronous approach; it is a new real-time programming and modelling approach; it was initially used by synchronous languages. In this study, the authors use the synchronous Petri nets formalism (SynPN) which is a synchronous formalism combining the advantages of synchronous languages and those of Petri nets