Petri net based decision system modeling in real-time scheduling and control of flexible automotive manufacturing systems

• High level Petri nets and object-oriented design approaches have been presented.
• PN based method is adapted to the flexible automotive manufacturing system (FAMS).
• PN based method is illustrated by modeling a real-time scheduling and control for FAMS.
• The method formulates the dynamic behavior of the system.
• Artifex PN software tool is employed to model the system.

This paper presents the design and the implementation of a Petri net (PN) model for the control of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). A flexible automotive manufacturing system used in this environment enables quick cell configuration, and the efficient operation of cells. In this paper, we attempt to propose a flexible automotive manufacturing approach for modeling and analysis of shop floor scheduling problem of FMSs using high-level PNs. Since PNs have emerged as the principal performance modeling tools for FMS, this paper provides an object-oriented Petri nets (OOPNs) approach to performance modeling and to implement efficient production control. In this study, we modeled the system as a timed marked graph (TMG), a well-known subclass of PNs, and we showed that the problem of performance evaluation can be reduced to a simple linear programming (LP) problem with m − n + 1 variables and n constraints, where m and n represent the number of places and transitions in the marked graph, respectively. The presented PN based method is illustrated by modeling a real-time scheduling and control for flexible automotive manufacturing system (FAMS) in Valeo Turkey.