MODELLING DISTRIBUTED MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS VIA FIRST ORDER HYBRID PETRI NETS

A Distributed Manufacturing System (DMS) is a collection of independent companies possessing complementary skills and integrated with transportation and storage systems. This paper proposes a new model for DMS employing first order hybrid Petri nets, i.e., Petri nets based on first order fluid approximation. More precisely, transporters and manufacturers are described by continuous transitions, buffers are continuous places and products are represented by continuous flows routing from manufacturers, buffers and transporters. Moreover, discrete events occurring stochastically in the system are considered to take into account the start of the retailer requests and the blocking of transports and raw material supply. With the aim of showing the model effectiveness, a DMS example is modelled and simulated under two different operative conditions.