In: Lectures on Concurrency and Petri Nets: Advances in Petri Nets, pages 742-788. Volume 3098 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Jörg Desel, Wolfgang Reisig, Grzegorz Rozenberg (Eds.) --- Springer-Verlag, June 2004.
Abstract: There exists ample literature on Petri nets and its potential in the modelling, analysis, synthesis and implementation of systems in the manufacturing applications domain. This paper provides an examples-driven perspective. Nevertheless, not only complete examples from the application domain are considered. Manufacturing systems are frequently large systems, and conceptual complexity often appears because of some particular local constructions. The examples considered in this selected tour try to introduce in a progressive way some applied concepts and techniques. The starting point is an assembly cell, for which models concerning several phases of the design life-cycle are presented. Afterwards, some pull control and kanban management strategies are modelled. Then, two coloured models of production lines are presented. After that, a manufacturing system with two cells is modelled, and the difficulty of the practical analysis is shown. For very populated manufacturing systems or systems with high cadence, relaxation of discrete event models leads to hybrid and continuous approximations, an example of which will be shortly introduced.