State machine reduction for the approximate performance evaluation of manufacturing systems modelled with cooperating sequential processes

We concentrate on a family of discrete event systems obtained from a simple modular design principle that include in a controlled way primitives to deal with concurrency, decisions, synchronization, blocking, and bulk movements of jobs. Due to the functional complexity of such systems, reliable throughput approximation algorithms must be deeply supported on a structure based decomposition technique. We present a decomposition technique and a fixed-point search iterative process based on response time preservation of subsystems. Extensive numerical experiments have shown that the error is less than 3%, and that the state space is usually reduced by more than one order of magnitude