Performance evaluation of repetitive automated manufacturing systems

Steady-state performance evaluation of some repetitive automated manufacturing systems previously modeled by means of stochastic or deterministic timed Petri nets is considered. Concepts and techniques previously developed by the authors are applied to repetitive manufacturing systems. Linear programming problems defined on the incidence matrix of the underlying Petri nets are used to compute tight upper and lower bounds for the performance measures of job-shop systems and decision-free kanban systems in polynomial time on the net structure. The results can be extended to other models in which some decisions are allowed, such as producer-consumer systems with mutual exclusion. Exact performance measures for a class of systems containing sequential processes can be computed in polynomial time