Continuous Petri Nets with Delays for Performance Evaluation of Transfer lines

Thanks to their simplicity and efficiency, continuous flow models are frequently used for performance evaluation and optimization of manufacturing systems. Although resource capacity constraints can be explicitly taken into account in existing continuous flow models, delays are rarely explicitly taken into account. The purpose of this paper is to introduce continuous Petri nets with delay for explicit modeling of delays for more realistic performance evaluation of failure prone transfer lines. One salient feature of this model is the explicit modeling of delays without destroying the nature of pure continuous flow model. This feature preserves the analyticity of pure continuous flow models for performance evaluation and optimization.