Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets for the Design and Performance Assessment of Distributed Automation Architectures

Distributed automation system (DAS) architecture gathers all the hardware and software automation components in order to realize control and monitoring tasks for factory process. To submit and commercially secure an architecture offer, system integrators must assess the performances of a wide range of candidate architectures, which enforce functional requirements. Among many available methodologies, Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) have already proven their capabilities to assess DAS architecture performances. However, performance assessment using CPN involves a manual definition of the required models which is time-consumer, when a huge amount of different architectures must be considered. This paper introduces a practical CPN-based methodology to automatically generate the relevant architecture CPN model by instantiation and parameterization of generic CPN components model. It allows easily defining, assessing and validating the architecture. This study is supported by Schneider Electric Company and illustrated with process automation reference architectures.