Petri nets approach for designing the migration process towards industrial cyber-physical production systems

Presently, many industries are facing strong challenges related to the demand of customized and high-quality products. These pressures lead to internal company's conflicts where current production systems have a rigid structure, forcing the company into a organization stall when a fast product change is required. Therefore, the need to smoothly migrate traditional systems into more feature-rich and cost-effective systems, namely Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), became a highly discussed topic. PERFoRM project focuses the conceptual transformation of existing production systems towards plug&produce ones to achieve flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing environments. In particular, the smooth migration process is considered crucial to effectively transpose existing production systems into truly CPPS. This paper describes the use of Petri nets to design the migration process under the PERFoRM perspective, taking advantage of its inherent capabilities to design, analyze, simulate and validate such complex processes.