Improved methods for scheduling flexible manufacturing systems based on Petri nets and heuristic search

This paper proposes and evaluates two improved Petri net (PN)-based hybrid search strategies and their applications to flexible manufacturing system (FMS) scheduling. The algorithms proposed in some previous papers, which combine PN simulation capabilities with A * heuristic search within the PN reachability graph, may not find an optimum solution even with an admissible heuristic function. To remedy the defects an improved heuristic search strategy is proposed, which adopts a different method for selecting the promising markings and reserves the admissibility of the algorithm. To speed up the search process, another algorithm is also proposed which invokes faster termination conditions and still guarantees that the solution found is optimum. The scheduling results are compared through a simple FMS between our algorithms and the previous methods. They are also applied and evaluated in a set of randomly-generated FMSs with such characteristics as multiple resources and alternative routes.