Fuzzy Coloured Petri Nets in modelling flexible manufacturing systems

Recently, Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) have been widely used for modelling asynchronous discrete events exhibited in dynamic systems, while Fuzzy Petri Nets (FPNs) used for systems that involve approximate reasoning and uncertainty knowledge inference. In this paper, we propose a net-based structure, the so-called Fuzzy Coloured Petri Nets (FCPNs) to model both the dynamic behaviour and inexact production inference of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs). Our approach is based on the integration of the concepts of CPNs and FPNs. It was applied to a typical FMS, i.e. a printed circuit board production system demonstrating the model's capability in simulating the system behaviour and fuzzy control rule's inference.