Declarative approach to cyclic steady state space refinement: Periodic process scheduling

Abstract

Problems of cyclic scheduling are usually observed in flexible manufacturing systems which produce multitype parts where the automated guided vehicle system plays the role of a material handling system, as well as in various other multimodal transportation systems where goods and/or passenger itinerary planning plays a pivotal role. The schedulability analysis of the processes executed in the so-called systems of concurrent cyclic processes (SCCPs) can be executed within a declarative modeling framework. Consequently, the considered SCCP scheduling problem can be seen as a constraint satisfaction problem. Such a representation provides a unified way for evaluating the performance of local cyclic processes as well as of multimodal processes supported by them. Here, the crucial issue is that of a control procedure (e.g., a set of dispatching rules), which would guarantee the cyclic behavior of the SCCP. In this context, we discuss the sufficient conditions guaranteeing the schedulability of both local and multimodal cyclic processes, and we propose a recursive approach in designing them. © 2013 The Author(s).