Scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems Subject to No-Wait Constraints via Petri Nets and Heuristic Search

• Published in: IEEE transactions on systems, man, and cybernetics. Systems Vol. 51; no. 10; pp. 6122 - 6133
• Main Authors: Wang, Xinnian, Xing, Keyi, Feng, Yanxiang, Wu, Yunchao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Flexible manufacturing system (FMS); Flexible manufacturing systems; Heuristic; Heuristic algorithms; heuristic search; Job shop scheduling; Job shops; Manufacturing systems; no-wait; Petri net (PN); Petri nets; Schedules; Scheduling; Search problems; Searching; System recovery
• ISSN: 2168-2216; 2168-2232
• DOI: 10.1109/TSMC.2019.2958494

This article addresses the scheduling problem of deadlock-prone flexible manufacturing systems subject to no-wait constraints for the first time, and develops a new scheduling algorithm based on the place-timed Petri net (PN) model and heuristic search. The considered problem can be solved by two procedures: 1) timetabling and 2) sequencing. The timetabling is to translate a given job sequence into a feasible schedule that satisfies the deadlock-free and no-wait constraints. A novel timetabling algorithm based on the controlled PN model is then proposed for solving it. The goal of sequencing is to find a job sequence so that the makespan of the corresponding schedule is the minimum. To this end, a hybrid heuristic search (HHS) is developed by combining the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{A} </tex-math></inline-formula>* algorithm and dynamic window. Two new heuristic functions are designed to guide the search, and the dynamic window is used to limit the searched space. The performance of HHS with different heuristic functions and deadlock controllers is evaluated by ten instances. The computational results demonstrate that through the proposed approach, optimal or suboptimal feasible schedules can be obtained within a reasonable time.