Modeling Process Platform-Based Production Reconfiguration With Petri Nets

The production processes of product families involve diverse changeovers in manufacturing and assembly processes in order to accommodate a high variety of component parts and assemblies. Reconfiguring production processes based on process platforms has been recognized as a promising means for companies to produce product variety while achieving mass production efficiency. Aiming at modeling support to production reconfiguration, this paper develops a multilevel system of nested colored object-oriented Petri nets (PNs) with changeable structures. In accordance with the fundamental issues of production reconfiguration, the modeling formalism is developed by taking advantages of several PNs techniques, including colored PNs, object-oriented PNs, changeable PNs, and nested PNs. The modeling formalism comprises a resource net, manufacturing net, assembly net and process net. The paper demonstrates how these net definitions are applied to specify production processes at different levels of abstraction. Also reported is a case study in an electronics company. The application results reveals the feasibility of the nested colored object-oriented PNs with changeable structures for capturing and representing the logic of production reconfiguration based on process platforms.