Modeling and Control of Production Task Flows using High-Level Activity-Based Petri Nets

Abstract

This chapter presents a systematic methodology for modeling and controlling productive tasks at the organization and coordination levels in advanced production systems, especially focusing on design and implementation aspects of lean production systems. Petri nets have been successfully introduced as an effective tool for describing control specifications and realizing the control. Nowadays, large-scale and complex production systems have a hierarchical structure, and the controllers are distributed according to their physical structure. Therefore, it is natural to realize the hierarchical and distributed management and control. In this chapter, to overcome some difficulties in the modeling of production systems with a large number of elements in Petri nets, High-Level Activity-Based Petri Nets (HAPN) are defined based on condition-event Petri nets. The high-level extended net representation of the production task flows can provide more synthetic specifications for consistent management and control of production systems by a top-down refinement methodology.