A mathematical programming approach for the reconfiguration of reconfigurable manufacturing systems with token identification

Abstract

The concept of flaxible manufacturing system (FMS) has been initially introduced to enable the production of different types of parts at the same time. But dependable requirements and especially the necessity to continue to produce in spite of the breakdown of a plant component led to exploit the flexibility to reconfigure the plant. Nowadays, the challenge for researchers and industrials is thus to build reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). A RMS must be able to adapt its configuration in real-time depending on production objectives and available resources. In a previous work, we proposed a systematic methodology allowing to formulate a reconfiguration problem as a reachability problem in Petri nets, and to solve it using optimization techniques. Our basic idea was to reuse the Petri net models built during the design phase of the control part (extended operating sequences & pregraph). Numerical experiments shown the validity of our proposition. In this paper, we propose to enhance the expressivity of our modelling methodology by associating identifiers to tokens. Such an approach can avoid the confusion of parts in the plant and allow to model much more possible reconfiguration situations. The previous mathematical model is modified in a linear way in order to save the efficiency of the resolution. © 2007 IEEE.