Resolving deadlocks in flexible manufacturing cells

Considered is a flexible manufacturing cell with a central buffer of finite room and a material handling device of unit load capacity. Deadlock occurs when various products with different routings compete for a finite number of resources. Proposed are two real-time control algorithms to resolve deadlocks. One algorithm follows the deadlock detection/recovery strategy, while the other avoids a deadlock state. It is shown empirically that the latter one results in a better performance of the cell than the former. Both algorithms require a small amount of on-line information and are applicable under a wide variety of conditions.