Издательство Springer, 2007, -351 pp.This book presents results of research achieved in friendly collaboration across borders and moreover between continents and emphasizes a belief in engineering science being for the benefit of mankind the world over. This aspect of the book’s ethos is epitomized by the authors’ profiles, one being from Central Europe and one from the USA.
A number of years ago research work on a woodworking process control raised our interest in discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS). We remembered that the process was an automatic production of laminar parquetry precasts. Work-piece preparation and composition included many discrete events and concurrent processes. Since then, we have started a systematic study of DEDS. Each school year since 1993, we have given lecture courses on DEDS within the Master program at the Department of Automatic Control Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, and undergraduate and graduate programs in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA, respectively.
The presented textbook contains most of the lecture material gradually elaborated in the courses of the past ten years. Our teaching activities have been accompanied by significant research and student projects in the field of DEDS, mainly on various topics concerning Petri nets used for modeling, analysis, performance evaluation, discrete-event control, supervisory control, and job scheduling of manufacturing processes, automatic guided vehicles in flexible manufacturing, assembly/disassembly processes, computer networking, and workflow management. Other discrete event models and their applications under our study include statecharts, ladder logic diagrams, finite state machines, digraphs, and Grafcet.
While performing the teaching and research activities, we have felt a strong need for a textbook that systematically and comprehensively introduces the mathematical background and various modeling tools for the purpose of DEDS analysis, performance evaluation, control, and scheduling. Thus students and researchers of various background can easily learn and grasp the essence of DEDS that is of growing importance. Their demand and the needs arising from our teaching, research and development activities motivate us to write this present book.
The mentioned lectures and this book particularly concentrate on Petri nets and their use in the modelling and control design for DEDS. They serve as a basis for extending to other tools and approaches such as Grafcet, statecharts, supervisory control theory and job scheduling. The textbook contains the necessary mathematics and computer science material. It includes discrete mathematics, formal languages, and finite automata. They are essential for non-computer science/engineering students to master the subjects of DEDS. Such material helps one describe and understand the nature of DEDS as well as the methods to describe and govern them. Standard and reactive flow diagrams are then introduced. The substance and properties of Petri nets and other tools useful for the modeling of DEDS have been built up systematically. Advanced Petri net tools include timed, stochastic, colored, fuzzy, and adaptive Petri nets. Petri net-related tools include Grafcet (also terms Sequential Function Charts), and statecharts. Various aspects concerning control design methods are followed consistently throughout the textbook. Theoretical aspects are illustrated and explained using numerous problem-solving examples dealing with various computer-integrated systems. We summarize the contents of all fourteen chapters as follows.Basic Description of Discrete-event Dynamic Systems
Graphs in Modeling DEDS
Formal Languages
Control of DEDS
Finite Automata
Reactive Flow Diagrams
Petri Net Models of DEDS
Properties of Petri Nets
Grafcet
Timed and High-level Petri Nets
Statecharts
DEDS Modeling, Control and Programming
Supervisory Control
Job Scheduling
