| Abstract | This paper first presents heirarchical scheduling and control architecture for a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) that is currently set up at the Mechanical Industrial Research Laboratories of the Industrial Technology Research Institute at Hsinchu, Taiwan. With this architecture, the authors focus on the scheduling problem of the FMC and present a schelduling mechanism based on a colored timed Petri net (CTPN) model. Using the CTPN-based scheduler, an appropriate combination of dispatching rules for each given batch can be selected to fit given criteria, for example, minimun batch completion time, maximum resource utilization or minimum tardiness, etc. Moreover, real-time status of the FMC can be represented in the mechanism for obtaining the on-line scheduling effect. |
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