Nested coloured timed Petri nets for production configuration of product families

Abstract

Production configuration is as an effective technique to deal with product variety while maintaining production stability and efficiency. It involves a diverse set of process elements (e.g., machines, operations), a high variety of component parts and assemblies and many constraints arising from product and process variety. Production configuration entails the selection and subsequent arrangement of process elements into complete production processes and the final evaluation of configured multiple alternatives. To better understand production configuration and its implementation, we study the underlying logic for configuring production processes using a dynamic modelling and visualisation approach. This is accomplished by developing a new formalism of nested coloured timed Petri nets (PNs). In view of the inherent modelling difficulties, in the formalism three types of nets -process nets, assembly nets and manufacturing nets -together with a nested net system are defined. Using an industrial example of vibration motors, we show how the proposed formalism can be applied to specify production processes at different levels of abstraction to achieve production configuration.

Generic modeling propositions for configuring, sale, product and production

“…In this regard, with focus on sales or product configuration, the existing studies are insufficient to accommodate product customization from a holistic view, i.e., the entire product customization process ranging from functional feature determination to product configuration to production. Pointed out by several authors, production configuration is promising for maintaining production of customized products to be as stable as possible, reducing production lead time and improving product quality [3] [4]. Its rationale lies in configuring routings for customized products from existing process elements while exploiting design similarity and the corresponding process similarity.…”

EBSD-assisted Laue microdiffraction for microstrain analysis

“…In that case, the technique is well established and has been shown to be very powerful (MacDowell et al, 2001;Kirchlechner, Keckes, Motz et al, 2011). Improvement of Laue image processing using DIC has been recently proposed by and Zhang et al (2015), leading to excellent relative strain accuracy up to 10 À5 (Zhang et al, 2017). Taking into account the cross section of the X-ray beam, the size of the beam imprint on the sample is of the order of 0.1-0.25 mm 2 , and this is expected to decrease even further as a result of advances in X-ray beam focusing technologies.…”

The impact of applying product-modelling techniques in configurator projects

“…To respond to these challenges, configurators are used to support design activities, which involve gathering information from customers and generating the required product specifications Salvador 2002a, 2007). A configurator is a knowledge-based system that supports the user in the specification process of personalized products by providing design choices, in which a set of components, along with their connections, are pre-defined and constraints are used to prevent unfeasible configurations (Felfernig, Friedrich, and Jannach 2000;Zhang and Rodrigues 2010;Eigner and Fehrenz 2011;Long et al 2016). Thus, the use of configurators means that the generation of product specifications (e.g., quotes, sales prices, bills of materials, CAD models) can be automated (Hvam, Mortensen, and Riis 2008).…”