Discrete event systems modeling and scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems

In this paper we describe Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) using Petri nets, since Petri nets provide a powerful tool for modeling dynamical behavior of discrete concurrent processes. We deal with off-Line and on-Line rule-based scheduling of FMS. The role of the rule-base is to generate appropriate priority rule for resolving conflicts, that is, for selecting one of enabled transitions to be fired in a conflict set of the Petri nets. This corresponds to select a part type to be processed in the FMS. Towards developing more Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) we propose a conceptual framework of a futuristic intelligent scheduling system.