Construction and performance analysis of a Petri net model based on a functional model in a CIM system

The so-called functional models, such as IDEF0, are useful tools for describing, designing and analysing the functional aspects of a complex manufacturing system, for example a CIM (computer integrated manufacturing) System. Though it involves considerable time and cost to build a sound functional model, the model usually cannot be used directly in further systems analysis procedures, such as quantitative performance analyses, due to its informal nature. To overcome this problem, we suggest a Petri net based procedure. First, we build a Petri net model from the IDEF0 and IDEF3 models, both of which are functional modelling tools widely used in real applications. Then, employing steady-state analysis for the Petri net, we propose a method to obtain performance measures such as the production rate. Since the analytical ability of a Petri net diminishes with increasing manufacturing system size, we develop a technique to aggregate and consolidate the Petri net to alleviate this problem that is associated with increasing complexity. An example problem is included to show the viability of our method for constructing a Petri net from a functional model and to evaluate the performance of the Petri net in an analytic manner.