Continuous approach of scheduling problems based on Petri nets

Scheduling a manufacturing system is usually an NP-hard problem. This means that only heuristic algorithms can be used to provide near-optimal schedules. In this paper, we show that a manufacturing system can be modelled using a particular type of Petri nets, called controllable-output nets (CO nets). These Petri net models are then used to introduce a two-stage scheduling algorithm for large horizon problems. The first stage consists of distributing the workload among the resources. The second stage derives a schedule from the resource workload. The deterministic case is considered. Numerical results are proposed.