Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Anytime heuristic search for scheduling flexible manufacturing systems: a timed colored Petri net approach

  • ORIGINAL ARTICLE
  • Published:
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Given the fluctuations in demand, diversity in products, production flexibility requirements, and tight customer due dates, obtaining optimal production schedules is considered a complex research problem. This can drastically affect the survival of some manufacturing companies in today’s fiercely competitive global market. In a very demanding decision-making environment, scheduling problems are dealt with in a short-term horizon, in which computation time is a critical factor. Producing optimal solutions is practically impossible given the time limitations and the nondeterministic polynomial (NP)-hard nature of scheduling problems. This paper presents an anytime-heuristic search approach based on a simulation-optimization framework that combines evaluation methods (simulation) and search methods (optimization) through the reachability analysis (or state space) of timed colored Petri net models to schedule flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). The anytime search algorithm is capable of finding a first suboptimal solution very quickly and continuously improves the solution quality over time. If given enough computation time, the algorithm eventually converges to an optimal solution. The proposed approach is aimed at obtaining optimal or near-optimal solutions to FMS scheduling problems in relatively short computation times with the objective of minimizing the makespan. Its effectiveness is highlighted with excellent results that outperform previous methods on benchmark examples with flexible material handling systems, machine, and routing configurations. The approach can also serve as a decision support tool to assist production schedulers that require rapid and almost real-time responses to time-critical production scheduling on the shop floor.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Pinedo M (1995) Scheduling: theory, algorithms, and systems. Prentice Hall international series in industrial and systems engineering. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs

    Google Scholar 

  2. Baker K (1974) Introduction to sequencing and scheduling. Wiley, New York

    Google Scholar 

  3. Lee DY, DiCesare F (1994) Scheduling flexible manufacturing systems using petri nets and heuristic search. IEEE Trans Robot Autom 10(2):123–132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Xiong HH, Zhou M (1998) Scheduling of semiconductor test facility via petri nets and hybrid heuristic search. IEEE Trans Semicond Manuf 11(3):384–393

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Angel Piera Eroles M, Narciso Farias ME, Buil Gine R (2009) Flexible manufacturing systems. In: Merkuryev Y, Merkuryeva G, Mn Piera, Guasch A (eds) Simulation-based case studies in logistics, chap. 7. Springer, London, pp 109–126

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Tuncel G, Bayhan G (2007) Applications of petri nets in production scheduling: a review. Int J Adv Manuf Tech 34(7–8):762–773

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Zurawski R, Zhou M (1994) Petri nets and industrial applications: a tutorial. IEEE Trans Ind Electron 41(6):567–583

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Mujica M, Piera MA, Narciso M (2010) Revisiting state space exploration of timed coloured petri net models to optimize manufacturing system’s performance. Simul Model Pract Theory 18(9):1225–1241

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Piera MA, Narciso M, Guasch A, Riera D (2004) Optimization of logistic and manufacturing systems through simulation: a colored petri net-based methodology. Simulation 80(3):121–129

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Narciso ME, Piera MA, Guasch A (2012) A time stamp reduction method for state space exploration using colored petri nets. Simulation 88(5):592–616

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Sun TH, Cheng CW, Fu LC (1994) A petri net based approach to modeling and scheduling for an FMS and a case study. IEEE Trans Ind Electron 41(6):593–601

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Yu H, Reyes A, Cang S, Lloyd S (2003) Combined petri net modelling and AI-based heuristic hybrid search for flexible manufacturing systems—part II. Heuristic hybrid search. Comput Ind Eng 44(4):545–566

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Shih H, Sekiguchi T (1991) A timed petri net and beam search based online fms scheduling system with routing flexibility. In: Proceedings 1991 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation, 1991, vol 3, pp 2548–2553

  14. Moro A, Yu H, Kelleher G (2000) Advanced scheduling methodologies for flexible manufacturing systems using petri nets and heuristic search. In: Proceedings ICRA ’00 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation, 2000, vol 3, pp 2398– 2403

  15. Huang B, Shi XX, Xu N (2012) Scheduling FMS with alternative routings using petri nets and near admissible heuristic search. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 63(9-12):1131–1136

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Huang B, Sun Y, Sun YM, Zhao CX (2010) A hybrid heuristic search algorithm for scheduling FMS based on petri net model. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 48(9-12):925–933

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Mejia G, Odrey NG (2005) An approach using petri nets and improved heuristic search for manufacturing system scheduling. J Manuf Syst 24(2):79–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Wang Q, Wang Z (2012) Hybrid heuristic search based on petri net for FMS scheduling. Energy Procedia 17 Part A(0):506–512

  19. Nilsson NJ (1980) Principles of artificial intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  20. Hansen EA, Zhou R (2007) Anytime heuristic search. J Artif Intell Res(JAIR) 28:267–297

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Aine S, Chakrabarti PP, Kumar R (2007) Awa*—a window constrained anytime heuristic search algorithm. In: Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on artificial intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, pp 2250–2255. IJCAI’07

    Google Scholar 

  22. Likhachev M, Gordon GJ, Thrun S (2003) Ara*: anytime A* with provable bounds on sub-optimality. In: Thrun S, Saul L, Scholkopf B (eds) Advances in neural information processing systems, vol 16. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  23. van den Berg J, Shah R, Huang A, Goldberg KY (2011) Anytime nonparametric A*. In: AAAI

  24. Vadlamudi S, Gaurav P, Aine S, Chakrabarti P (2012) Anytime column search. In: Thielscher M, Zhang D (eds) AI 2012: advances in artificial intelligence, Lecture notes in computer science, vol 7691. Springer, Berlin, pp 254–265

    Google Scholar 

  25. Jensen K (1997) Coloured Petri Nets. Basic concepts, analysis methods and practical use. Volume 2, Analysis Methods, EATCS series, vol 2. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  26. Piera M, Music G (2011) Coloured petri net scheduling models: timed state space exploration shortages. Math Comput Simul 82(3):428–441

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  27. Hu H, Li Z (2009) Modeling and scheduling for manufacturing grid workflows using timed petri nets. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 42(5–6):553–568

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Hong D, Li C, Chentao W, Qianni D (2006) A grid-based scheduling system of manufacturing resources for a virtual enterprise. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 28(1–2):137–141

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Jensen K, Kristensen LM (2009) Coloured Petri nets: modelling and validation of concurrent systems. Springer, Berlin

    Book  Google Scholar 

  30. van der Aalst W (1993) Interval timed coloured petri nets and their analysis. In: Ajmone Marsan M (ed) Application and theory of petri nets 1993. lecture notes in computer science, vol 691. Springer, Berlin, pp 453–472

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  31. Lakos C, Petrucci L (2007) Modular state space exploration for timed petri nets. Int J Soft Tools Technol Tran 9(3–4):393–411

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Christensen S, Kristensen L, Mailund T (2001) Condensed state spaces for timed petri nets. In: Colom J M, Koutny M (eds) Applications and theory of petri nets 2001. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 2075. Springer, Berlin, pp 101–120

    Google Scholar 

  33. Zhang W (1998) Complete anytime beam search. In: Proceedings of the fifteenth national conference on artificial intelligence, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, AAAI ’98. Menlo, pp 425–430

  34. Zhou R, Hansen EA (2005) Beam-stack search: integrating backtracking with beam search. In: Biundo S, Myers K L, Rajan K (eds) ICAPS, AAAI, pp 90–98

  35. Zhou R, Hansen EA (2002) Memory-bounded A* graph search. In: FLAIRS conference, pp 203–209

  36. Chen TRM, Hsia T (1997) Scheduling for IC sort and test facilities with precedence constraints via Lagrangian relaxation. J Manuf Syst 16(2):117–128

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Zhou R, Hansen EA (2006) Breadth-first heuristic search. Artif Intell 170(4–5):385–408

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  38. Zamani R (2010) A parallel complete anytime procedure for project scheduling under multiple resource constraints. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 50(1–4):353–362

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Telecommunications and Systems Engineering, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Sabadell, Barcelona, Spain

    Olatunde T. Baruwa & Miquel A. Piera

Authors
  1. Olatunde T. Baruwa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Miquel A. Piera
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olatunde T. Baruwa.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Baruwa, O.T., Piera, M.A. Anytime heuristic search for scheduling flexible manufacturing systems: a timed colored Petri net approach. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 75, 123–137 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-014-6065-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-014-6065-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation