The flow shop scheduling problem modeled by means of timed place Petrini nets

Abstract

The Flow Shop Scheduling Problem (FSSP) is a problem that is commonly found by master production scheduling planners in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). The planner should find the optimal scheduling to carry out a set of jobs in order to satisfy the predefined objective (e.g., makespan). All the jobs are processed in a production line composed of a set of shared machines. Furthermore, the jobs are processed in the same sequence. In order to be able to analyze this problem in a better way, this problem needs to be represented adequately for understanding the relationship among the operations that are carried out. Thus, an FMS presenting the FSSP can be modeled by Petri nets (PNs), which are a powerful tool that has been used to model and analyze discrete event systems. Then, the makespan can be obtained by simulating the PN through the token game animation. In this work, we propose a new way to calculate the makespan of FSSP based on timed place PNs. Keywords: Flow shop scheduling problem; makespan; Petri nets.