Application of Coloured Petri Nets in the Prospective Analysis of Cooperative Provision of Industrial Services

Product-related services in the capital goods industry are characterised by international customer demands. Often these demands can only be met efficiently by cooperating with other partners. However, the decisionmaking process for cooperation configuration still lacks adequate support. Existing approaches for evaluating cooperation and services are not suitable for an assessment of different alternatives prior to their implementation. Simulation approaches for a cooperative provision of industrial services have not yet been developed. This paper deals with an approach to overcome this problem and presents a model based on Petri net theory for the prospective analysis of cooperative provision of industrial services. 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. 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.