Manufacturing Systems (MS) can be identified with discrete-item production. Actually, many of
these systems conciliate high-volume production with crescent level of flexibility. Basically, MS is composed
of Production Units (PU) and each PU is a set of machines, robots and others devices that produce items
which are part of the final product. PUs have applied control strategies to integrate Automated Guided
Vehicle (AGVs). However new technology is necessary to promote the flow of a high volume and a variety
of items between the PUs. Therefore, it is essential to use the concept of Intelligent Transportation Vehicles
System (IVTs) to transport all of the items that compose final products of MS. This work proposes distributed
collaborative control architecture for MS with IVTs. The flow of items between the PUs of the MS can be
treated as a problem of resource allocation control where the resources are the PUs and the IVTs are
responsible for transport activities. Thus, it is necessary to model the global process to generate the rules for
deadlock avoidance: to determine the rules that use Resource Allocation Graphs and to model the control
used in graphs derived from Petri nets. The aim result is a standard model for IVT assignment. The
difference in this approach is the isomorphism of models that represent productive activities and transport
activities which are essential for maintenance and reusability in accordance with the dynamic products of the
life cycle.
Keywords: Deadlock Avoidance, Distributed Collaborative Control, Intelligent Transportation Vehicles, Petri
nets, Resource Allocation Graphs.
