Industrial processes design and simulation using timed Petri nets

The increasing complexity of products and the challenges coming from the global market scenario force all the companies to make continuous efforts in the optimisation of industrial processes to join high efficiency to low production costs. Petri nets are a powerful event-driven modelling language, originally adopted in the ICT sector and even more diffuse in the industrial sector. This paper proposes a general approach to support the design and simulation of industrial processes through timed Petri nets. The description of the approach steps is deeply focused together with the discussion of a real application taken from the industry.