An improved evaluation of ladder logic diagrams and Petri nets for the sequence controller design in manufacturing systems

Sequence controller designs play a key role in advanced manufacturing systems. Traditionally, the ladder logic diagram (LLD) has been widely applied to programmable logic controllers (PLC), while recently the Petri net (PN) has emerged as an alternative tool for the sequence control of complex systems. The evaluation of both approaches has become crucial and has thus attracted attention. The “basic element” approach was developed to evaluate the complexity and flexibility for LLD and PN design approaches [1, 2, 3, 4]. However, the basic elements of these two designs are inherently different and hence that approach may lead to unreliable results. Since sequence control here naturally implies the use of logic rules, a rule-based approach is proposed in this paper to provide unified measures for both LLD and PN designs. To illustrate the proposed approach, it is applied to five control sequences with increasing complexity for a stamping process. Results indicate that the proposed approach is more suitable for real applications and, furthermore, PN is increasingly superior to LLD as the control sequence becomes more complex.