Reconfigurable fault tolerant deadlock avoidance controller synthesis for assembly production processes

Guarantee of deadlock-free operations is a prerequisite for achieving high resource utilization in flexible manufacturing systems. As production processes may contend for shared resources, the addition or removal of production processes has impacts on the liveness property of the systems. Uncertainties in manufacturing systems may result in unavailability of resources and may in turn lead to deadlocks and have negative impacts on the scheduled activities and performance. The design of deadlock avoidance control logics for manufacturing systems with unreliable machines to meet changeable, high-variety of product demands is a challenging problem. We develop deadlock avoidance control synthesis algorithms that are: (1) reconfigurable to incorporate or remove production processes while maintaining the liveness property, (2) robust to cope with uncertainties, and (3) scalable for realistic cases