A study of both the theoretical development of Petri nets and industrial applications in areas such as discrete-event control design, scheduling, performance evaluation and deadlock avoidance. The contributions also include comparative studies of Petri nets and other approaches.

Over the past two decades, research in the theory of Petri nets and the development of graphical tools has yielded a powerful methodology. The contributions in this book present both the theoretical development of Petri nets and industrial applications in areas such as discrete-event control design, scheduling, performance evaluation and deadlock avoidance. There are also comparative studies of Petri nets and other approaches. A primary theme of the book is to provide a unified approach to the applications of Petri nets in flexible and agile automation and, in that regard, a common notation and terminology is used. The book also allows readers to evaluate the benefits and applicability of state-of-the-art Petri-net methods and apply CAD tools to problems of interest.

• Introduction to Petri nets in flexible and agile automation, MengChu Zhou and R. Zurawski
• application of Petri nets to sequence-control programming, T. Murata
• computer-aided design of logic controllers with Petri nets, L. Ferrarini
• automatic generation of sequence-control programs via Petri nets and logic tables for industrial applications, T. Sato and K. Nose
• planning and scheduling based on Petri nets, J.-M. Proth and I. Minis
• Petri-net-based heuristic scheduling for flexible manufacturing, Doo Young Lee and F. DiCesare
• scheduling and rescheduling of AGVs for flexible and agile manufacturing, Shifang Li et al
• stochastic Petri-net models of communication and flexible systems, Jiacun Wang and Shengbing Jiang
• deadlock-avoidance policy for flexible manufacturing systems, Keyi Xing et al
• discrete-event control design for manufacturing systems via ladder logic diagrams and Petri nets - a comparative study, K. Venkatesh et al
• from state transition models to DFD extended methods for specifying reactive systems, Abd-El-Kader Sahraoui
• supervisory control specification and synthesis, M. Jafari.