Relationship between Petri Nets and Cellular Automata for the Analysis of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

In this paper an association between Petri nets (PN) and cellular automata (CA) is proposed to analyze the global dynamics of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). This relation is carried out taking into account the discreteness in the dynamics of both PN and CA. In particular, generalized PN as well as one-dimensional CA are used. The work consists in modeling with PN both a single process with a shared resource and two p arallel processes with several shared resources. The PN models are simplified by reduction rules and then the corresponding one-dimensional CA is obtained. Finally, the global dynamics of the FMS modeled is described by using the analysis methods of CA.