A temporised Petri net approach for design, modelling and analysis of flexible production systems

The aim of this work is to present an approach, which allows the reproduction of a flexible production system behaviour during production operations and gives feedback about its efficiency, in order to validate the system's specifications. The modelling and analysis of flexible production systems are investigated for both functional and performance objectives. The paper focuses particularly on the modelling and analysis of production systems using a new proposed temporised Petri net tool and demonstrates how the model obtained suits the tasks well by producing a higher accuracy system description. An analysis methodology based on both structural and reachability-like approaches, is also presented to derive the behaviour characteristics of the modelled systems in terms of their functionality and performance. From validation data analysis the user can obtain useful suggestions regarding layout configuration and strategies of resource management and can be guided throughout the whole production system design phase. An application example is given.