Enhanced Production Flow Schema for Modeling the Complex Resource Sharing System

Abstract

The authors propose in this paper a novel graphical representation “PFS-R” for complex resource sharing discrete production systems. The PFS-R is an augmented version of PFS (Production Flow Schema, previously proposed by the authors) that includes correspondences of system resources to each production step in PFS. The PFS-R is able to model system structures as well as system behaviors in a more simplified and transparent manner than ordinary Petri net representations. First, the paper introduces basic elements of PFS-R, and equivalent transformation of PFS-R model to a hybrid net and Petri nets, taking into account the net conservativity. Next, we present an example of discrete production system to illustrate the effectiveness of PFS-R. In addition, we deduce through the example that the correspondence between resources and production steps in process flows has the tree structure, which is effective to evaluate whether or not the objects designed have a well-defined structure.KeywordsDiscrete production systemsPetri netsProduction Flow Schema (PFS)Mark Flow Graph (MFG)resource sharing.