Multi-Site Manufacturing System Scheduling Using Petri Nets

Modelling plays a vital role in the development, implementation and scheduling Manufacturing Systems (MS). Models are often used to provide insight into how the MS and its components interact. The main goal of such model is to schedule operations on the appropriate resources to achieve the optimal overall system performance.This study aims to propose an enhanced Petri Nets (PN) modeling combined with heuristic search for MS and in particular for Multi-Site MS.The proposed PN, it generates a near optimal schedule regarding few criteria for a chosen set of operations. The model can handle some constraints such as the precedence order between operations, shared resources, resource allocation, transportation time between sites, etc.The model proposed is applied to 20 instances of Multi-Site MS and compared with two heuristics.