Nested coloured timed Petri nets for production configuration of product families

Production configuration is as an effective technique to deal with product variety while maintaining production stability and efficiency. It involves a diverse set of process elements (e.g., machines, operations), a high variety of component parts and assemblies and many constraints arising from product and process variety. Production configuration entails the selection and subsequent arrangement of process elements into complete production processes and the final evaluation of configured multiple alternatives. To better understand production configuration and its implementation, we study the underlying logic for configuring production processes using a dynamic modelling and visualisation approach. This is accomplished by developing a new formalism of nested coloured timed Petri nets (PNs). In view of the inherent modelling difficulties, in the formalism three types of nets–process nets, assembly nets and manufacturing nets–together with a nested net system are defined. Using an industrial example of vibration motors, we show how the proposed formalism can be applied to specify production processes at different levels of abstraction to achieve production configuration.