An expert enhanced coloured fuzzy Petri net approach to reconfigurable manufacturing systems involving information delays.

In today’s competitive market, manufacturers need to quickly adapt to the changing demands of the customers. Reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a cost-effective system that can easily absorb frequent changes in product demands. In this article such a system is modelled using expert enhanced coloured fuzzy Petri net (EECFPN), which considers the demands of customers as a fuzzy parameter and vividly captures the reconfigurability aspect of RMS. A fuzzy control strategy (FCS) is proposed to deal with the information delays occurring during information transfer or decision implementation. After intensive computational experimentation, it has been found that FCS outperforms the alternative priority (AP) heuristic and it is considered an effective measure to deal with situations where considerable information delay is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]