Consistent use of emulation across different stages of plant development — The case of deadlock avoidance for cyclic cut-to-size processes

This paper presents an emulation tool and the way in which it supports the test-driven design of zero-deadlock cut-to-size plants. In contrast to previous plant layouts featuring a linear material flow, panels can now be allocated to the same saw again for their further partitioning. The resulting circles in the material flow of cut-to-size plants impose new challenges as they may cause deadlocks, which means that the manufacturing system or parts of it remains indefinitely blocked. In order to prevent deadlock occurrences, an algorithm is developed and implemented into the software controlling the cut-to-size plant. The necessary tests are performed in an iterative way with the help of our emulation tool, which connects the plant control software with the virtual analogs of the control and the field layers.