Priority-Based Distributed Manufacturing Process Modeling via Hierarchical Timed Color Petri Net

Petri net (PN) is a classical tool for modeling, simulation, and analysis. With the emergence of distributed manufacturing system (DMS), PN has been evolved into different forms such as colored PN (CPN) and timed PN (TPN). To fulfill the practical requirements, CPN has been extended to a larger and more complex model. Meanwhile, DMS becomes an important issue for industry, and how to model a complex manufacturing network for better throughput needs further investigation. A simple single type of PN only cannot fulfill all contemporary requirements at the same time. This paper proposes a new concept for a new PN-hierarchical timed CPN (HTCPN), which can be a powerful tool for modeling, simulation, and analysis for current large complex distributed manufacturing system. This paper presents a general structure of DMS and uses HTCPN to model the manufacturing system as discrete event with dynamic behavior. The proposed approach shows superiority on modeling large complex manufacturing system as it represents the material flow and transitions clearly and provides overview and detailed description for DMS.