As more and more producers move to use flexible and agile manufacturing as a way to keep them with a competitive edge, the investigations on deadlock resolution in automated manufacturing have received significant attention for a decade. Deadlock and related blocking phenomena often lead to catastrophic results in automated manufacturing systems. Their efficient handling becomes a necessary condition for a system to gain high productivity. This paper intends to present a tutorial survey of state-of-the art modeling and deadlock control methods for discrete manufacturing systems. It presents the updated results in the areas of deadlock prevention, detection and recovery, and avoidance. It focuses on three modeling methods: digraphs, automata, and Petri nets. Moreover, for each approach, the main and relevant contributions are selected enlightening pros and cons. The paper concludes with the future research needs in this important area in order to bridge the gap between the academic research and industrial needs.

Deadlock control methods in automated manufacturing systems

In this paper, an optimal deadlock prevention policy for flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is proposed. In an FMS, deadlocks can arise because of a limited number of shared resources, i.e. machines, robots, buffers, fixtures etc. Deadlock is a highly undesirable situation, where each of a set of two or more jobs keeps waiting indefinitely for the other jobs in the set to release resources. The proposed optimal deadlock prevention policy is based on the use of reachability graph analysis of a Petri net model (PNM) of a given FMS and the synthesis of a set of new net elements, namely places with initial marking and related arcs, to be added to the PNM, using the theory of regions, which is a formal synthesis technique to derive Petri nets from automaton-based models. The policy proposed is optimal in the sense that it allows the maximal use of resources in the system according to the production requirements. Two examples are provided for illustration.

An Optimal Deadlock Prevention Policy for Flexible Manufacturing Systems Using Petri Net Models with Resources and the Theory of Regions

Deadlocks are a rather undesirable situation in a highly automated flexible manufacturing system. Their occurrences often deteriorate the utilization of resources and may lead to catastrophic results in safety-critical systems. Graph theory, automata, and Petri nets are three important mathematical tools to handle deadlock problems in resource allocation systems. Particularly, Petri nets are considered as a popular formalism because of their inherent characteristics. They received much attention over the past decades to deal with deadlock problems, leading to a variety of deadlock-control policies. This study surveys the state-of-the-art deadlock-control strategies for automated manufacturing systems by reviewing the principles and techniques that are involved in preventing, avoiding, and detecting deadlocks. The focus is deadlock prevention due to its large and continuing stream of efforts. A control strategy is evaluated in terms of computational complexity, behavioral permissiveness, and structural complexity of its deadlock-free supervisor. This study provides readers with a conglomeration of the updated results in this area and facilitates engineers in finding a suitable approach for their industrial scenarios. Future research directions are finally discussed.

Deadlock Control of Automated Manufacturing Systems Based on Petri Nets—A Literature Review

Over the last two decades, a great deal of research has been focused on solving deadlock problems in resource allocation systems such as computer communication systems, workflow systems, and flexible manufacturing systems, resulting in a wide variety of approaches. As a well-defined problem in resource allocation systems, deadlock prevention based on a Petri net formalism has received an enormous amount of attention in the literature. This paper intends to review and compare a variety of Petri net-based deadlock prevention policies reported in the literature. Their comparison is done in terms of structural complexity, behavior permissiveness, and computational complexity. This paper should facilitate engineers in choosing a suited method for their industrial application cases.

A Survey and Comparison of Petri Net-Based Deadlock Prevention Policies for Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Modern production facilities (i.e. flexible manufacturing systems) exhibit a high degree of resource sharing, a situation in which deadlocks (circular waits) can arise. Using digraph theoretic concepts we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a deadlock occurrence and rigorously characterize highly undesirable situations (second level deadlocks), which inevitably evolve to circular waits in the next future. We assume that the system dynamics is described by a discrete event dynamical model, whose state provides the information on the current interactions job-resources. This theoretic material allows us to introduce some control laws (named restriction policies) which use the state knowledge to avoid deadlocks by inhibiting or by enabling some transitions. The restriction policies involve small on-line computation costs, so they are suitable for real-time implementation. For a meaningful class of systems one of these policies is the least restrictive deadlock-free policy one can find, namely it inhibits resource allocation only if leads directly to a deadlock. Finally, the paper discusses the computational complexity of all the proposed restriction policies and shows some examples to compare their performances.

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Event-based feedback control for deadlock avoidance in flexible production systems

Flexible manufacturing systems are capable of producing a broad variety of products and changing their characteristics quickly and frequently. This flexibility provides for more efficient use of resources, but makes control of these systems more difficult. Control problems previously unstudied now require practical resolution, like system deadlock. A system deadlock is a situation that arises due to resource sharing in manufacturing systems, when the flow of parts is permanently inhibited and/or operations on parts cannot be performed. This problem has been ignored by most scheduling and control studies, which usually assume infinite machine queue capacity and unlimited tooling resources. FMS's, however, have little or no queue capacity and limited tooling resources. In this paper, graph-theoretic deadlock detection and resolution procedures are presented which are suitable for real-time control of manufacturing systems. These procedures determine whether part movement in the system causes system deadlock or not. To this end, a system status graph representing part routings is virtually updated for every part movement before parts move physically to the next destination. Two types of system deadlocks, part flow deadlock and impending part flow deadlock, are detected using the updated system status graph. If a deadlock detection and recovery method is used to recover from a deadlock using a storage buffer, only part flow deadlocks need to be detected. On the other hand, if no buffer is available, both types of existing as well as impending system deadlocks need to be detected to avoid a deadlock situation. >

Graph-theoretic deadlock detection and resolution for flexible manufacturing systems

Production scheduling models that determine part mix ratios and detailed schedules do not usually account for deadlocks that can be caused by part flow. Deadlocks must be prevented for operational control (especially in automated systems). The major thrust of this paper is in developing a structured model for deadlock detection, avoidance and resolution caused by part flow in manufacturing systems. A system status graph can be constructed for the parts currently in the system. Deadlock detection amounts to determining deadlocks in the system status graph. On the other hand, deadlock avoidance amounts to restricting parts movement so that deadlocks are completely avoided in the future. While deadlock detection is a one-step look ahead procedure, deadlock avoidance is a complete look ahead procedure. Deadlock resolution or recovery amounts to judiciously using a limited queue to recover from deadlocks. Deadlock detection and avoidance are absolutely crucial to uninterrupted operation of automated m...

T. K. Kumaran

Papers

Graph-theoretic deadlock detection and resolution for flexible manufacturing systems

A structured approach to deadlock detection, avoidance and resolution in flexible manufacturing systems