Supervisor Design and Simplification for Automated Manufacturing Systems Using Colored Petri Nets

Colored Petri nets are widely used to model Automated Manufacturing Systems thanks to their compactness to describe complex networked systems. Compared to general Petri nets, they allow many folding techniques so as to condense the system model. With them, many control synthesis problems are reduced to the solution of matrix operations. Supervisory control techniques can be realized in a computationally efficient way. In this work, these matrices are further distinguished by independent and dependent ones. A method is proposed to identify these independent ones while removing those dependent ones. As a result, a supervisor can be significantly simplified. In practice, this implies the significant reduction of cost, increase of reliability, and improvement of performance. Examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method.