A class of Petri nets for manufacturing system integration

Abstract

This paper introduces a class of Petri nets which are reversible, live, and can be kept bounded. Furthermore, these Petri nets have output transitions that can be fired independently from each other. These properties are required when modeling manufacturing systems. Another important property is that the integration of models which belong to this class of Petri nets still belongs to the same class, assuming that the integration is performed following rules which reflect common manufacturing practice. As a result, the qualitative properties of the module models are preserved. The results obtained in this paper are expected to shed light on the design, management and control of large scale manufacturing systems since modular approach is a way to cope with complexity.