A Search Approach Based on the Petri Net Theory for FMS Scheduling

Abstract This paper presents a heuristic search approach based on the Petri net theory for scheduling flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs). The proposed method models an FMS using a timed Petri net and uses the solutions of the net's state equation to predict the total cost. That is, the heuristic function considers gobal information provided by the state equation. This makes the method possible to obtain solutions better than those in prior work which consider only the current status or limited global information. In addition, to reduce memory requirement and thus to increase the efficiency to deal with larger systems, the scheduling algorithm proposed in this paper contains a procedure to reduce the search space.