High productivity is the primary goal of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) in which semi-independent workstations are integrated using automated material-transport systems and hierarchical local networks. Availability of various subsystems and of the system as a whole is a prerequisite for achieving functional integration as well as high throughput. An FMS also has inherent routing and operation flexibilities that provide it with a certain degree of fault tolerance. A certain volume of production can thus be maintained in the face of subsystem (i.e., machines, robots, material handling system, etc.) failures. In this article, we propose two reliability measures, namely, part reliability (PR) and FMS reliability (FMSR) for manufacturing systems and present algorithms to evaluate them. We also consider the dynamic or time-dependent reliability analysis as a natural generalization of the static analysis. The methods outlined use an algorithm that generates process-spanning graphs (PSGs), which are used to evaluate the reliability measures.

In this paper, we propose an approach, using Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) for modelling flexible manufacturing systems. We illustrate our methodology for a Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC) with three machines and three robots. We also consider the analysis of the FMC for deadlocks using the invariant analysis of CPNs.

Petri nets have evolved into a powerful tool for analyzing asynchronous concurrent systems. In this paper we review the applications of Petri nets to FMSs. We present applications of Petri net models in the design of simulators for flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) and in the verification (by investigating the presence/absence of deadlock) of the logic used to design the hardware/software for controllers used in FMSs.

This paper describes the structure of a parallel processing system, primarily suitable for real-time Linear Prediction (LP) analysis and synthesis of speech signals. This system employs specially developed parallel forms of the well known algorithms (Levinson's Recursion, SIFT as well as LP synthesis filter) for this purpose. The feasibility of implementing the proposed structure using microprogrammable microprocessors, is then discussed. The proposed scheme can be readily adapted for on-line identification of autoregressive processes.