A TCPN based approach to model the coordination in virtual manufacturing organizations

The recent developments of communication technologies and network computing have enabled the occurrence of the advanced manufacturing strategy—agile manufacturing. The essence of the agile manufacturing strategy is to form a virtual manufacturing organization (VMO), which integrates the core competencies of member enterprises in order to respond to the global market and increasing customer requirements rapidly. In a VMO, the manufacturing processes are distributed. So modeling and coordination of these processes are very complex. In this paper, we present a Petri Net based approach to model these distributed manufacturing processes and interaction relations among them. A workflow based manufacturing process execution environment is also established to support the implementation of the distributed manufacturing processes.