A Step-Wise Specification of a Manufacturing System Using Petri Nets

Our experience, mainly based on two recently conducted real-life studies for some European companies, reveals that a natural way to proceed with the modeling and specification of large manufacturing system is to decompose the model of the entire system into sub-systems (referred to as modules). Models for modules are developed, and then integrated to model the entire system. Several problems arise in this process. If we express these problems from the users' point of view, they can be summarized by the following two issues: (i) how to decompose the whole system into sub-systems modules in order to have tractable (thus small) models exposing "good" properties? (ii) how then to integrate the module models in order to reach a global model also exposing "good" properties