A live subclass of petri nets and their application in modeling flexible manufacturing systems

In this paper a novel policy is proposed to solve the deadlock problem in a class of flexible manufacturing systems based on the notion that each shared buffer is partitioned into parts to store different types of products, respectively. A subclass of Petri nets called resource-shared net with buffers (RSNB) is defined. An RSNB is constructed by synthesizing some marked graphs, and each marked graph can model the process of manufacturing one type of product. RSNB cannot only model the concurrent execution of manufacturing processes, but also ensure that the modeled system is live. The process of constructing RSNB is described in detail, and a minimal siphon based necessary and sufficient condition is provided to characterize the liveness of RSNB.