K. WINKELMANN and H. LUCZAK: PROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF INDUSTRIAL SERVICES

International customer demands in the capital goods industry force providers of industrial services to be present on a global market. Often this can only be realised efficiently by cooperating with partners. But the process to configure a cooperation and choose an adequate cooperation alternative still lacks adequate support. Existing approaches to evaluate services or cooperation are not suitable for an assessment of different alternatives prior to their implementation. Simulation approaches for production networks on the other hand, cannot be used for industrial services. This paper deals with an approach to overcome this problem and presents a simulation model based on Petri net theory for the prospective analysis of cooperative provision of industrial services. To achieve this goal, a domain-specific conceptual model of cooperative provision of industrial services has been developed that considers the constitutive characteristics of industrial services and their cooperative provision and maps them onto the formal notation of coloured Petri nets to form an executable simulation model. As a result, machine and equipment producers will be able to assess their cooperation alternatives related to integrated service provision in advance and thus avoid cost-intensive false decisions.