Towards a communicating petri net tool for modeling production processes

This paper presents an analysis of the process concept based on the Events, Activities and Process oriented approach. The analysis has been conducted by constructing a comparison table between the several elements of a process. Several tools exist in the literature for the production processes modeling (IDEF0/IDEF3, DFD, Flowcharts, Petri Nets). We are particularly interested in modeling with the Stochastic Petri nets tool. This graphical tool is presented and analyzed for process modeling. The need for defining a communication policy between the activities of a production process when dealing with graphical modeling tools is explained. In this context, the requirement specifications to establish the mentioned communication policy are defined. These specifications tend to determine the links and the types of relations between the activities.