Description of productive processes in a collaborative environment

Companies have been forced to collaborate with each other, sharing knowledge, adopting and applying better practices of product design and manufacturing, and exploring internet-based applications. This collaborative activity is established in the context of productive processes, properly described. In other words, the steps of the productive process should be described in a language that could be interpreted by the production equipment of different collaborators (companies that are part of this new organization). However, the available languages for describing the processes today do not consider heterogeneous environments with heterogeneous productive resources (equipment, tools, devices and others from different manufacturers, for example). On the other hand, there are formal methods that allow extensions that make them able to describe and interpret the productive operations sequence. One of such tools is the Petri net, which is used in the modeling and analysis of discrete event systems. Thus, a notation is proposed, based on Petri net, for the description of productive processes in a collaborative environment.