Petri Nets Theory Based Product Development Process Modeling

In order to succeed in the increasingly fierce market competition, today's companies have to shorten the cost and time-to-market of products, while they also should maintain products' high quality. Moreover, the increase of the product's complexity and the adoption of the new product development patterns have brought great challenges to product development management and planning. A good product development process model which can exactly describe product development processes and information flows is badly needed for the better understanding, coordinating, collaboration, analysis, improvement, control and management of product development.A series of Petri nets based product development process modeling methodologies have been proposed in this paper. The methods not only can represent the characteristics of product development, but also can implement quantitative performance analyses on cost, time and resources in product development.The conception of Design Information Constraint Tree (DICT) is proposed to describe the relations of tasks information constraints based on the relationship between product components. The information-centric DICT is the foundation for process-centric process modeling. An algorithm for translation DICT into FTWF-nets based process model is presented with the construction of fuzzy timed workflow nets (FTWF-nets). This approach provides a semi automatic generation of product development process model and quantitative performance analysis on it.A Colored Petri Nets based resource manager model is proposed based on the analysis of resources of product development and their allocations, which can assign and manage resources dynamically. Aim to shorten product development circle and settle down the resources bottle-necks and conflicts, we provide a Timed Colored Petri Nets based resource dynamic distribution model to optimize the distribution and utilization of resources. Quantitative analysis and optimal allocation of resources can be realized by the model's interactive simulation.Hierarchical Timed Colored Petri Nets (HTCPN) based process modeling method is introduced so as to exactly and fully describe a great deal of actions, phenomena, characteristics and information in product development, simulate and optimize the process mode. The HTCPN based process model provides a good platform for quantitative performance analysis of HTCPN and product development process model based on HTCPN.An integrated model for systematic analysis and simulation of complicated processes has been presented after analyzing the IDEFO model and the colored Petri nets model. An effective modeling and simulation language-hierarchical timed colored Petri nets based workflow nets (HTCPNWF-nets) is also propose in the study. The algorithms for translating IDEFO into HTCPNWF-nets have been developed. The capabilities of description, simulation and analysis for complex process systems can be improved effectively by analyzing the HTCPNWF-nets based model, which is also proved to be an effective and efficient product development process modeling method on process reengineering.