On deterministic modelling and simulation of manufacturing systems with Petri Nets

Resumen

Petri Nets (PNs) include a family of formalisms with different levels of abstraction and interpretations, which constitute a paradigm for the modelling, simulation, analysis, synthesis and implementation of discrete systems. Due to their efficiency to cope with concurrence, parallel evolutions and synchronism, they have been widely used in automated manufacturing systems, in practically all the levels of decision-making and detail. A continuous approximation of PNs, the continuous PNs, was originally devised like an approach to deal with discrete systems efficiently when the well-known problem of state explosion occurs; but they can also be used as a formalism to model continuous concepts of the production systems (like can be done with Forrester Diagrams). This paper carries out an analysis of the use of PN, in their diverse forms (discrete, continuous and hybrid), for the deterministic and precise modelling of production industrial systems. Special attention is paid to the choice of the appropriate formalism as well as to its semantics, and some external applications are presented to enlarge the descriptive capability of the formalism or to calculate information that could provide a more accurate model. © 2005 Frydman, LSIS.