Activity Based Costing with Petri Nets

This paper presents an approach to perform Activity Based Costing (ABC) with Petri nets. ABC is a powerful methodology to calculate various costs of discrete event systems (e.g. production systems). Petri net models of discrete event systems are easy to create, comprehend, and to perform analysis, the mathematics behind Petri nets is also easy to grasp. This paper shows how ABC can be performed with Petri nets, so that various costs involved in a discrete event system can be easily measured with the help of the Petri net model. After a short introduction to ABC and Petri nets, this paper shows the approach which basically embeds various cost drivers as "firing costs" and "firing times" of transitions in a Petri net model. This work also presents a case study that is done with GPenSIM, a toolbox realized with this approach.