A robust control approach to AMSs allowing multiple types of resources via Petri Nets

Abstract

There is much research on automated manufacturing systems (AMSs), particularly regarding their deadlock problems, in order to improve their competitiveness. Resources in most of deadlock solutions are always supposed never to fail. However, this is not the case in practice since some resources may fail unexpectedly. A robust system should be resilient to such failures. Thus, it requires that the failure of a resource can only affect the processes which mandatorily require the failed ones. In this paper, we focus on the robust control of AMSs with unreliable resources. On the basis of deadlock avoidance strategy, we propose a robust control algorithm in the paradigm of extended systems of simple sequential processes with resources, which can acquire multiple types of resources and obey a multipath selection mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective as well as efficient in response to resource failures.