This chapter considers the problem of deadlock avoidance in flexibly automated manufacturing systems, one of the most prevalent supervisory control problems that challenges the effective deployment of these environments. The problem is addressed through the modeling abstraction of the (sequential) resource allocation system (RAS), and the pursued analysis uses concepts and results from the formal modeling framework of finite state automata (FSA). A notion of optimality is defined through the notion of maximal permissiveness, but the computation of the optimal DAP is shown to be NP-Hard. Hence, the last part of the chapter discusses some approaches that have been developed by the relevant research community in its effort to deal with this negative complexity result.
IntroductionContemporary manufacturing is characterized by (i) an ever increasing emphasis on automation and by (ii) a quest for broader product lines and more customized product offerings [22].Indeed, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, automation has been at the core of the mass-production concept and practices, enabling activities and tasks that frequently transcend the human element in terms of capability, consistency, durability and speed [21]. More recently, automation has also been advocated as a key enabler for controlling the overall production cost, especially in economies where labor cost is particularly high. Hence, there is an increasing tendency to confine the presence of the human element on the production shop-floor to supervisory and maintenance tasks only, while the actual production activity is taken over by "intelligent" hardware, materialized in the form of numerically controlled (NC) machines, CHAPTER 6. 2 robots, and other material handling equipment. Clearly, enabling the reliable deployment of such an extensive mode of automation is a pretty challenging task. Yet, in the recent years, things have been further complicated, and the aforementioned challenges have been further exacerbated, by the second manufacturing trend mentioned above, i.e., the emphasis that is placed by the global markets upon choice and customization. This trend implies a need to support the production of a broader set of items, in smaller batch sizes, and with shorter life spans. Such demand and production patterns negate the economies of scale and the efficiencies of the dedicated production lines that have been sought by traditional manufacturing, and (re-)places the emphasis on concepts like resource sharing, flexibility, reconfigurability and concurrency [18]. But the current reality has also shown that the effective support of these concepts on the manufacturing shop-floor is highly non-trivial, and it adds an entirely new layer of complexity and challenges to the aforementioned endeavors towards the automated operation of production systems. The manufacturing world has become increasingly conscious of the fact that the successful design and deployment of flexibly automated production systems necessitates the development of a (ma...