Production configuration of product families: An Approach based on Petri Nets

Configuring production processes for product families has been acknowledged as an effective means of dealing with product variety while maintaining production stability and efficiency. In an attempt to assist practitioners to better understand and implement production configuration, we study the underlying logic for configuring production processes for product families by means of dynamic modelling and visualization. Accordingly, we develop a formalism of nested colored timed Petri nets (PNs) to model production configuration. To cope with the modelling difficulties resulting from the fundamental issues in production configuration, three types of nets, namely process nets, assembly nets and manufacturing nets, together with a nested net system are defined by integrating the principles of colored PNs, timed PNs and nested PNs. An industrial example of electronics products is used throughout the whole paper to demonstrates how the proposed formalism is applied to specify production processes at differently levels of abstraction to achieve production configuration.