Modeling production networks with discrete processes by means of communities of autonomous units

Abstract

Communities of autonomous units are devices for the visual modeling of interactive logistic processes. The framework is founded on rule-based graph transformation and allows specifying autonomous units in such a way that they can run in parallel and make their decision about future actions independently of each other. The usefulness of the framework is demonstrated in this paper by modeling a new variant of production networks with discrete production processes. One of the main results shows that the visual model is correct with respect to a more traditional quantitative mathematical model.