Towards Decentralized Tracking Control for Petri Nets

In this work, three distributed strategies are proposed for the control of automated manufacturing systems, based on the tracking control paradigm for Interpreted Petri nets (IPN). In this paradigm, the control objective is to enforce the plant system, modelled as an IPN, to perform sequences of actuators' activations, described by others IPN named the specifications. In a first architecture, local controllers are independently synthesized, concurrently controlling disjoint sections of the plant. In a second architecture, communication between the local controllers is allowed, realized by an industrial network. Finally, the third architecture includes a high-level controller, named coordinator, that guarantees the fulfillment of global specifications. For illustrative purposes, these architectures are applied to a simplified model of a robotic manufacturing cell.