Supervisory control of multi-workcell manufacturing systems with shared resources

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) may comprise a number of workcells where production resources are shared among the cells for a variety of practical reasons. Although the utilization of independent workcells with sharing resources improves the flexibility of FMSs, avoiding deadlocks is essential for their successful implementation. The paper introduces a methodology for the synthesis of a set of conflict- and deadlock-free supervisors to individually control every workcell within a FMS inter-related by common (shared) resources. The proposed methodology is based on extended Moore automata and controlled-automata theories