Using Shared-Resource Capacity for Robust Control of Failure-Prone Manufacturing Systems

Deadlock-free resource allocation has been an active area of research in flexible manufacturing. Most researchers have assumed that allocated resources do not fail, and thus, little research has addressed the discrete-event supervision of manufacturing systems that are subject to resource failure. In our previous work, we developed supervisory controllers to ensure robust deadlock-free operation for systems with unreliable resources. These controllers guarantee that parts requiring failed resources do not block the production of parts that are not requiring failed resources. This previous work assumes that parts requiring failed resources can be advanced into failure-dependent (FD) buffer space (buffer space exclusively dedicated to parts requiring unreliable resources). Supervisors admit only states for which a sequence of such part advancements is feasible. The research presented in this paper relaxes this assumption because, in some systems, providing FD buffer space might be too ex...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TSMC
• Authors: Shengyong Wang, Song Foh Chew, Mark A. Lawley
• Keywords: Resource, Resource Allocation, TSMC 2008, Unreliable Resources