Building insightful simulation models using formal approaches — A case study on Petri Nets

In recent years development of formal approaches for modeling and simulation of manufacturing systems received significant attention. Approaches building on alternative Petri Nets formalisms show essential strengths in accurately capturing both a system´s static structure and its dynamics, availability of mathematical analysis methods, and graphical representation. However, models of realistic systems are often perceived as too large and complex to understand by project stakeholders. This hinders their participation in modeling, and solution finding, and may influence their perception of model credibility. In this article we address this issue by considering a structured approach for embodying high-level manufacturing concepts. The approach aims at creating more insightful simulation models by building on sound and explicit conceptualization, i.e., the choice of manufacturing concepts, and clear rules for their formalization, i.e., their mapping on elementary model components. We adopted the Petri Nets based tool ExSpect^TM to illustrate and evaluate our approach.