Although deadlock avoidance issue has attracted much attention and has been extensively studied, most of the existing results assume reliable machines. This assumption makes it difficult to apply existing deadlock avoidance algorithms to real manufacturing systems with unreliable machines. This paper presents the results to apply an existing deadlock avoidance algorithm to systems with unreliable machines by analyzing the robustness of the deadlock avoidance algorithm. Sequential production processes are considered in this paper, and Petri Net is adopted as the tool for modeling and analysis of the sequential processes. Different types of tolerable machine failures under which liveness property can be preserved are characterized. Computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is analyzed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.