Production management in a Petri net environment

The objective of this paper is to show that Pétri nets facilitate a comprehensive approach to production management and allows us to reduce the complexity of the problems involved at the expense of some constraints imposed on the décision making System. The first part of the paper focuses on cyclic manufacturing Systems. For this type of Systems, iî is always possible to propose an event graph model which represents both the physical and the décision making Systems. We use such a model to propose a near-optimal scheduling algorithm that maximizes productivity while minimizing the work-in-process (WIP) in the deterministic case. The approach usedfor non-cyclic manufacturing Systems is different in the sensé that only the manufacturing processes fi.e. the physical part of the System) and the related constraints are modelled using Pétri nets. We use such a Pétri net model to propose a short-term planning process which results in a trade-off between the computation burden and the level of resource utilization. The short-term planning model is then enhanced to obtain the scheduling model. The latter is used to develop an efficient scheduling algorithm that is able to satisfy the requirements imposed by short-term planning.