To solve the production scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) based on timed and bounded Petri
net models, the bounded Petri net is represented symbolically by zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams (ZBDD), and the symbolic ZBDD-based algorithm is developed. In this scheme, the marking vectors or states in Petri net are formulated compactly, and the search processes are manipulated explicitly. Thereby the time and space performances of searching Petri net are improved. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the symbolic algorithm.