Digital Library

Pairing state automata and petri nets - simulation of processes in logistics

• Carlo Simon
• Stefan Haag

(2024). ECMS 2024, 38th Proceedings
Edited by: Daniel Grzonka, Natalia Rylko, Grazyna Suchacka, Vladimir Mityushev, European Council for Modelling and Simulation.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.7148/2024
ISSN: 2522-2422 (ONLINE)
ISSN: 2522-2414 (PRINT)
ISSN: 2522-2430 (CD-ROM)
ISBN: 978-3-937436-84-5
ISBN: 978-3-937436-83-8 (CD) Communications of the ECMS Volume 38, Issue 1, June 2024, Cracow, Poland June 4th – June 7th, 2024

https://doi.org/10.7148/2024-0474

Carlo simon, Stefan haag (2024). Pairing State Automata and Petri Nets - Simulation of Processes in Logistics, ECMS 2024, Proceedings Edited by: Daniel Grzonka, Natalia Rylko, Grazyna Suchacka, Vladimir Mityushev, European Council for Modelling and Simulation. doi:10.7148/2024-0474

After the authors had successfully modelled and simulated the outdoor traffic of a warehouse with the aid of high-level Petri nets, they failed to do so for the combined in- and outbound traffic using the same technique. Even worse, this failure showed that the previously developed modelling technique does not scale, is hard to adapt to other scenarios, and difficult to teach.

This paper explains a new modelling approach which not only solves the simulation problem but also overcomes the above-mentioned limitations. Now, the different types of logistic processes in the warehouse are represented as finite automata that define the states of inbound and outgoing goods, the resources needed, and the time limitation of state transitions. A high-level Petri net is then tailored to execute several instances of these automata in parallel with respect to the formulated constraints.

The paper explains the real-world example, the development of the finite automata, the bottom-up construction of the Petri net, and an environment to run simulations of the warehouse with real-world data and to represent the results on a dashboard.