Petri net modeling of a flexible assembly station for printed circuit boards

Petri net modeling approaches are presented for a flexible workstation for automatic assembly of printed circuit boards. In order to improve the productivity of such a system, the building of mathematical models is a crucial step. Concentrating on the operational aspects, the authors construct ordinary and temporal Petri net models for the AT&T FWS-200 physical flexible workstation. Three outcomes follow from such models. First, designers can have a better understanding of concurrency, synchronization, mutual exclusion, and sequential relations involved in the system control from the graphical representations of Petri nets. Second, the performance analysis of system operations under different settings can be conducted. Thus, the results can be used to help designers choose the best operational setting on a basis of the system parameters. Third, the models can be used as an aid for automatic generation of real-time control programs and construction of Petri-net-based simulation if needed. The approaches suggested can be generalized to many other applications of multirobot assembly systems