Abstract
This paper proposes a deadlock prevention policy for flexible manufac-turing systems (FMSs) based on a think-globally-act-locally approach and a struc-turally minimal method. First, by using the think-globally-act-locally approach, a global idle place is temporarily added to a Petri net model with deadlocks. Then, at each iteration, an integer linear programming problem is formulated to design a minimal number of maximally permissive control places. Therefore, a supervisor with a low structural complexity is obtained since the number of control places is greatly compressed. Finally, by adding the designed supervisor, the resulting net model is optimally or near-optimally controlled. Three examples from the literature are used to illustrate the proposed method.