Transition-based deadlock control policy using reachability graph for flexible manufacturing systems

Most existing deadlock prevention policies deal with deadlock problems arising in flexible manufacturing systems modeled with Petri nets by adding control places. Based on the reachability graph analysis, this article proposes a novel deadlock control policy that recovers the system from deadlock and livelock states to legal states and reaches the same number of states as the original plant model by adding control transitions. In order to reduce the structural complexity of the supervisor, a set covering approach is developed to minimize the number of control transitions. Finally, two flexible manufacturing system examples are presented to illustrate the proposed approach.