ABSTRACT
When studying the deadlock avoidance problem in automated manufacturing systems (AMS), Wu (1997, 1999) and Wu and Zhou (2001a, 2001b) first proposed resource-oriented Petri nets (ROPNs) to model AMS. Such nets are then used to study the control problem in AGV systems and semiconductor manufacturing systems (Wu and Zhou, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007a; Wu and Zeng, 2002). ROPN views a part manufacturing process as a part visiting the resources one by one according to its prescribed processing routes. In this net, each resource is modeled by a single place, and the part manufacturing processes are modeled by the paths on which the parts visit the resources. Since each part manufacturing process is modeled in an implicit way, the model is very compact, and some useful structural characteristics can be clearly revealed. This chapter presents the ROPN modeling method and analyzes the characteristics of the ROPN model for AMS.
