Optimal schedules of manufacturing cells-modeling and analysis using timed Petri nets

A method for the systematic generation of simple and composite schedules for a large class of manufacturing cells is presented. The generated schedules can easily be transformed into timed Petri net models and these models evaluated using one of the methods developed for the analysis of timed Petri nets, for example, invariant analysis. Performance characterization (the cycle time or the throughput) obtained in this way can be used for optimisation of the cell's performance.