Scheduling Robotic Cellular Manufacturing Systems with Timed Petri Net, A∗ Search, and Admissible Heuristic Function

System scheduling is a decision-making process that plays an important role in improving the performance of robotic cellular manufacturing (RCM) systems. Timed Petri nets (PNs) are a formalism suitable for graphically and concisely modeling such systems and obtaining their reachable state graphs. Within their reachability graphs, timed PNs' evolution and intelligent search algorithms can be combined to find an efficient operation sequence from an initial state to a goal one for the underlying systems of the nets. To schedule RCM systems, this work proposes an A∗ search with a new heuristic function based on timed PNs. When compared with related approaches, the proposed one can deal with token remaining time, weighted arcs, and multiple resource copies commonly seen in the PN models of RCM systems. The admissibility of the proposed heuristic function is proved. Finally, experimental results are given to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method and heuristic function. Note to Practitioners-Robotic cellular manufacturing (RCM) systems are among the most common and complicated discrete-event dynamic systems, which provide a great number of choices of resources and processing routes to allow high system productivity. Timed Petri nets (PNs) and intelligent search algorithms on their reachability graphs are ideal tools to handle the RCM scheduling problem. This work proposes an A∗ search method based on the evolutions of timed PNs to optimally schedule RCM systems. The proposed method can deal with token remaining time, weighted arcs, and multiple resource copies often encountered in the PN models of RCM systems.