Object oriented stochastic petri net simulator: A generic kernel for heuristic planning tools

Abstract

To produce a large number of different products in an efficient way, traditional industry production architectures have incorporated non-value-adding operations such as transporting, storing and inspecting to provide flexibility. These operations should be minimised, if not eliminated, to improve performance on automated manufacturing systems. Heuristic planning tools seem to offer a good methodology to deal with a sub-optimal scheduling policy of present flexible manufacturing systems.In this paper an approach to evaluate and improve heuristic planning tools results will be presented.