Robust Control of Failure-Prone Manufacturing Systems With Assembly Operations

During the past two decades or so, many researchers devoted themselves to avoiding the deadlocks of automated manufacturing systems (AMSs). Many deadlock control policies have been developed under the assumption that AMSs do not contain unreliable resources and assembly operations. This work focuses on the deadlock control of failure-prone AMS with assembly operations and a single unreliable resource. At first, an automata model is developed to characterize the studied AMS. Then, four properties that a robust deadlock control policy for the studied AMS should satisfy are proposed and rigorously formulated for the first time. Finally, a new robust deadlock control policy based on the modified Banker’s algorithms is proposed. Compared with existing control policies, only the proposed one can well satisfy the newly proposed properties, thus representing a significant contribution to the field of robust control of failure-prone manufacturing systems.