In: Proc. IFAC Conf. on Control Systems Design (CSD'2000), 18-20 June 2000, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, pages 311-316. 2000.
Abstract: A branching scheme for the solution of scheduling problems based on reachability analysis of timed Petri net (PN) models of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) is described in this paper. The method reduces search by avoiding the generation of paths that do not represent an advantage with respect to already generated candidates. Experimental analysis shows that interesting search methodologies such as ``branch and bound best first A*'' and incomplete search methodologies such as ``beam search''.
Keywords: Petri nets, flexible manufacturing systems, reachability analysis, scheduling, search methods.