Modelling and Analysis of Supply Chains using Product Time Petri Nets
This work addresses the temporal feasibility of supply chain processes for industries requiring coordination under strict timing and resource constraints, representing an incremental advancement by applying PTPNs to this domain.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling and analyzing supply chains under strict timing constraints by proposing Product Time Petri Nets (PTPNs) to represent subsystems independently with synchronized transitions, explicitly including the supply chain manager as a critical resource. It analyzed how timing constraints and managerial capacity affect system behavior, identifying configurations leading to successful executions, timeouts, or timelocks, enabling systematic what-if analysis of coordination policies.
Supply chains involve geographically distributed manufacturing and assembly sites that must be coordinated under strict timing and resource constraints. While many existing approaches rely on Colored Petri Nets to model material flows, this work focuses on the temporal feasibility of supply chain processes. We propose a modular modelling approach based on Product Time Petri Nets (PTPNs), where each subsystem is represented independently and the global behaviour emerges through synchronised transition labels. A key feature of the model is the explicit representation of the supply chain manager as a critical shared and mobile resource, whose availability directly impacts system feasibility. We analyse how timing constraints and managerial capacity influence the system behaviour, identifying configurations that lead to successful executions, timeouts, or timelocks induced by incompatible timing constraints. This approach enables systematic what-if analysis of supply chain coordination policies and demonstrates the relevance of PTPNs for modelling and analysing synchronised timed systems.