An introduction to flexible manufacturing systems (FMS): definitions, characteristics and types of FMS, examples, a detailed analysis of flexibility and performance issues, flexible manufacturing system as discrete event dynamic systems (DEDS): models used to represent TMS and DEDS: petri nets, min. max. algebra approach, markov chain, finite state machine approach, simulation models. More emphasis will be given to petri-net and min. max. approaches, comparison of modeling techniques, control of FMS, control architectures, decomposition and coordination issues, disturbance and necessary corrective control actions, real time scheduling methodologies.