Simulation and analysis of reconfigurable assembly systems based on R-TNCES

ABSTRACT Recent research indicates that dynamic reconfiguration techniques can be applied to manufacturing systems to reduce energy consumption by switching energy-intensive components in a timely manner between their working and idle modes during system runtime because these components consume less energy in their idle modes than in their working modes. The current work studies reconfigurable assembly systems with such dynamic reconfiguration techniques by abstracting them as reconfigurable discrete event systems, considering only their logic behavior and properties. The formalism, R-TNCES (reconfigurable timed net condition/event systems), a modular extension of the well-known Petri nets, is used as a system modeling and analysis tool. The simulation of system global reconfigurations is guided by command inserting, whereas the simulation of local reconfigurations is automatic because their execution time is computed a priori by a proposed algorithm. Finally, qualitative properties specified by computation tree logic and quantitative analysis regarding energy-efficiency are performed by using the software SESA.