Comparison and Evaluation of Deadlock Prevention Methods for Different Size Automated Manufacturing Systems

In automated manufacturing systems (AMSs), deadlocks problems can arise due to limited shared resources. Petri nets are an effective tool to prevent deadlocks in AMSs. In this paper, a simulation based on existing deadlock prevention policies and different Petri net models are considered to explore whether a permissive liveness-enforcing Petri net supervisor can provide better time performance. The work of simulation is implemented as follows. (1) Assign the time to the controlled Petri net models, which leads to timed Petri nets. (2) Build the Petri net model using MATLAB software. (3) Run and simulate the model, and simulation results are analyzed to determine which existing policies are suitable for different systems. Siphons and iterative methods are used for deadlocks prevention. Finally, the computational results show that the selected deadlock policies may not imply high resource utilization and plant productivity, which have been shown theoretically in previous publications. However, for all selected AMSs, the iterative methods always lead to structurally and computationally complex liveness-enforcing net supervisors compared to the siphons methods. Moreover, they can provide better behavioral permissiveness than siphons methods for small systems. For large systems, a strict minimal siphon method leads to better behavioral permissiveness than the other methods.