Coloured Petri net simulator: a generic tool for production planning

To produce a large number of different products in an efficient way, traditional industrial production architectures have incorporated non-value-adding operations, such as transporting, storing and inspecting, to provide flexibility. These operations should be minimized, if not eliminated, in order to improve the performance of automated manufacturing systems. Heuristic planning tools seem to offer a good methodology to deal with a sub-optimal scheduling policy for current flexible manufacturing systems. In this paper, a simulation approach, based on coloured Petri nets, to evaluate and improve production planning policies is presented.