A tool for the educational study of manufacturing systems

In this article, a new application for teaching manufacturing systems is presented. A manufacturing system can be considered as a discrete‐event system constructed from devices that have a finite speed of operation. This application automatically simulates the manufacturing systems modelled by timed and stochastic Petri nets (PNs) with additional extensions that easily make possible to get specific information. The graphical model generated provides the necessary data to execute an event‐driven language programme that simulates the model and provides results. From the student's point of view, the problem is only to draw the PN accordingly with the characteristics of the system to be modelled and to get the information without noticing the underlying event‐driven language programme. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 18: 130–143, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20189

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