A timed Petri net based approach for the design of industrial processes

Purpose The effective design of the industrial processes represents a key asset to compete and to create a sustainable value for each company. Such a complex issue needs to integrate technological, economical, environmental and safety constraints and opportunities to be mixed together through a win-win strategy. The development of useful, easy-use and flexible approaches to analytically support both the researchers and the practitioners in the process design, development and simulation is expected and strongly encouraged. This paper focuses on the design and simulation of an industrial process adopting the timed Petri net approach. Considering a product flowing the manufacturing/assembly area and visiting a set of resources according to its working cycle, a timed Petri net design strategy is presented together with the static and dynamic analyses useful to predict the process key performances. The resource peculiarities, e.g. availability and conflicts, are, further, considered. A realistic case study is, finally, presented, to exemplify the proposed approach. Design/methodology/approach Starting from an overview of the timed Petri nets and their basic structure, the paper investigates an approach for their effective adoption in the industrial process design and simulation. An industrial and operative perspective is adopted and a case study is proposed to highlight the applicability of such a tool in a common operative context. The manufacture of a single product requiring dedicated resources and auxiliary devices is considered. The proposed approach starts from the production process analysis to identify both the production features and the required resource characteristics. The timed Petri net design is, then, discussed adopting the most suitable approach, i.e. physical vs. functional. Given the net, its static and dynamic analysis and simulation is faced to obtain useful indices about the production process performances, e.g. the throughput, the required resources, the resource availability, the waiting times, etc. Such analysis outcomes represent useful guidelines to drive possible design or re-design actions. Originality/Value The Petri nets and, particularly, the timed Petri nets represent a well known mathematical modeling language for the description of the distributed systems. Their potential and opportunities to support the process design and simulation is discussed by the literature, together with a wide set of customization opportunities. From this perspective, several approaches are proposed. On the contrary, minor attention is paid to highlight the operative applicability of such a tool and, secondarily, to the development of effective static and dynamic drivers of analysis. Frequently, the Petri nets are studied on their own without a deep focus to the contexts in which they are applied. A lack of applicability of the obtained outcomes should occur. This paper aim is to overcome such a weakness focusing on the applicability of the timed Petri nets to common operative contexts. Both the approach input and output are oriented to drive the process design. Furthermore, the proposed case study is realistic and its aim is to highlight the applicability and easy-use of the timed Petri nets for the industrial process analysis.