The Development of a Platform to Simulate Productive Systems in a Distributed Environment

Abstract. Pushed by the need of enlarging productive systems, the use of open distributed automation concept is spreading in industry. In distributed systems, some activities, such as the network data transmission may be seen as a succession of discrete states and instantaneous events. In this case, Petri Nets may be used to model this kind of system because it is known as a powerful tool used to model and to analysis concurrent, distributed, asynchronous, and parallel systems and it has a useful graphic representation and mathematic formalism. This work proposes the development of a platform to model and simulate productive systems, in a distributed computers environment. The adoption of middleware systems in this platform guaranties more portability, interoperability, scalability, and interconnectivity, allowing a future integration of this platform with real machines/resources. To help on the design of this platform, both ODP (Open and Distributed Processing) and UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams are used.