Maximally permissive distributed control of automated manufacturing systems with assembly operations using Petri nets

A well-established control mechanism for automated manufacturing systems (AMSs) can ensure not only nonblockingness but also maximal permissiveness as well as low computation to the best. To achieve this goal, a partition methodology and distributed control technique is developed based on divide and conquer philosophy for large scale AMSs. They are represented as interconnected and overlapping subsystems sharing some common components in terms of buffers. This paper concentrates on AMSs allowing assembly operations, which can be modeled by a special class of Petri nets, namely BAMG. A strategy is proposed to achieve the maximally permissive distributed control of such AMSs. After their capacities are well designed, buffers can partition a monolithic system into interconnected subsystems, for each of which a local supervisor can be independently constructed. The behavior compatibility among local controllers are studied as well. An experimental study illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.