Celeritas: a coloured Petri net approach to simulation and control of flexible manufacturing systems

Abstract

In many areas of computerization today, the capabilities of hardware systems far exceed the sophistication of software systems needed for optimum control. This research is an attempt to advance software control capabilities of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). To this end, an FMS controller architecture, called Celeritas, has been designed and a software system conforming to this architecture has been designed and implemented. Celeritas is a generic, data-configurable FMS controller designed using the coloured Petri nets (CP-nets) modelling paradigm augmented with decision support software to provide both FMS simulation and control. Formalisms of the CP-net paradigm provide straightforward representation of both the inherent concurrency and resource conflicts present in such a complex system. Augmentations provide user-defined routines for real-time interfaces to this information which is utilized to provide resource arbitration services among jobs competing for scarce resources and overall job scheduling.