A Timed Colored Petri Net Simulation-Based Self-Adaptive Collaboration Method for Production-Logistics Systems

Complex and customized manufacturing requires a high level of collaboration between production and logistics in a flexible production system. With the widespread use of Internet of Things technology in manufacturing, a great amount of real-time and multi-source manufacturing data and logistics data is created, that can be used to perform production-logistics collaboration. To solve the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a timed colored Petri net simulation-based self-adaptive collaboration method for Internet of Things-enabled production-logistics systems. The method combines the schedule of token sequences in the timed colored Petri net with real-time status of key production and logistics equipment. The key equipment is made ‘smart’ to actively publish or request logistics tasks. An integrated framework based on a cloud service platform is introduced to provide the basis for self-adaptive collaboration of production-logistics systems. A simulation experiment is conducted by using colored Petri nets (CPN) Tools to validate the performance and applicability of the proposed method. Computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the event-driven method in terms of reductions of waiting time, makespan, and electricity consumption. This proposed method is also applicable to other manufacturing systems to implement production-logistics collaboration.