A unified modeling of Kanban systems using petri nets

The success of some Just In Time (JIT) systems has led to a growing interest in Kanban systems, which provide a way to implement a JIT control policy. Much work has recently been devoted to this problem, and especially many models have been developed to evaluate the performance of such systems. In this article, we focus our attention of these existing models. Each author uses his/her own representation, which is not formal in most cases, and so it is often difficult to understand the proposed model and to compare it with others. In this article, we show that Petri nets are well suited to provide a unified modeling of Kanban systems. We first propose a basic model, then show that most models encountered in the literature can easily be represented by a Petri net model. Once such a formal model is obtained, it can then be used to analyze the behavior of the system, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Some preliminary results pertaining to the quantitative analysis are presented at the end of the article.