A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2006

There are a lot of changes in the market, first the cost was concerned, and later quality became a priority, now speed of delivery becomes one of the most necessary factors. Due to market requirements, the innovation of Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) became related to the effort of gaining competitive advantage. Nowadays, FMS is more important in most of factories in the world. Therefore, modeling and analyzing this is a key work before apply FMS in practice. In order to model and analyze a FMS, some tools are used such as: queuing networks software, simulation, Petri nets, linear program, etc ... Depending on some factors in market and technology, an engineer can chose a suitable tool. In scope ofthis research, Color Petri net is used as a tool to model and analyze a FMS. It is a modem and effective tool nowadays and used widely in telecommunication, computer science for allocating and organizing resources but it does not apply much in manufacturing system. In this thesis, the graphical model is researched and then transferred to a mathematical model. Once these models are created, they are applied to an FMS to minimize work in process by three steps: design the topology of a FMS, find the invariants and solve a linear program model. Hence, an example is proposed to implement all steps above. The result of an example is comPared with the black token Petri nets in order to evaluate and to see the useful of the new tool colored Petri nets. Hence, it can said that CPN is a better tool because it has a simpler graphical, fewer invariants and can using different multiple servers, etc