Petri net analysis of a transfer-line protocol

Petri nets are applied to the bottom-up design of a handshaking protocol for transferring parts through a sequence of workstations. The authors illustrate the application of Petri-net theory to verify properties of the complete system behavior based on the structure of the Petri-net model. It is shown that communication between local controllers is modeled by places corresponding to upstream and downstream messages. Consistency in the interconnection of the subsystem models is guaranteed by the identification of these communication places. To analyze the properties of the complete system, results on liveness and place invariants for Petri nets are applied to the Petri-net model