Performance evaluation of a flexible manufacturing system using two formal methods

The interest of this paper is to evaluate the cycle time of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) containing shared resources. Thus, we propose a comparative study between the heaps of pieces theory based approach and the net of conflicting timed event graphs (NCTEG) in (max, +) algebra based approach. The general idea of the first method is to pile up pieces considered in a heap automaton according to a certain scheduling of these pieces. Then, this enables to transform a safe Petri Net (PN) into a heap model. The second method consists of describing the behaviour of NCTEGs with an allocation sequence of the conflict places tokens in max-plus algebra. The main contribution of this paper is to solve the problem of management of the conflict place token using different real time scheduling rules where the behaviour of the system is given by simulation.