This work addresses the problem of the design of the control of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems by a synthesis approach. Our approach is inspired by Supervisory Control theory but is based on Petri nets (PN) models. The plant and the user specifications are both modeled by PN. The Ramadge and Wonham original works uses finite automata and many authors investigate synthesis approaches based on this formalism. However, finite automata present some drawbacks such as the difficulty to model parallelism, synchronization and resource sharing. The approaches based on this formalism are generally limited by the combinatorial explosion that occurs when attempting to model complex systems. On the other hand, Petri Net is a more powerful tool for modeling parallelization or synchronization. Our approach is also based on the Ghaffari’s Region Theory. This theory propose to synthesis control places that are added in an initial PN plant model in order to obtain a closed-loop PN that respect the user specifications. To make easier the use of our approach, we have developed a Petri net tool that assists a designer to build the plant controllers.
Petri net, controller synthesis, forbidden sequences, Reconfigurable Manufacturing System, Resource sharing, Constrained Synchronous Reachability Graph.
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