A Generalized Stochastic Petri Net Model for Management of Distributed Manufacturing Systems

A Distributed Manufacturing System (DMS) is a collection of independent companies possessing complementary skills and integrated with transportation and storage systems. This paper deals with the issues of modeling and managing a DMS. The system is modeled as a timed discrete event dynamical system by generalized stochastic Petri nets. Moreover, two well known broad policies are considered to manage the DMS: make-to-stock and make-to-order. In order to compare the two management techniques and to show the effectiveness of each method, a case study is presented.