Performance Analysis of Design Process Using Timed Petri Nets

Design in a concurrent engineering environment attempts to minimize the total design time subject to variety of constraints. A limited number of available human resources constrain the simultaneous execution of design activities. In this paper, a timed Petri-net model is built to represent the design process as a discrete event process. The state equations for the timed Petri-net model are established by dioid algebra. When the durations of design activities are deterministic, the allocation of human resources is analyzed by this model by determining the start times of the succeeding activities The discussion on the behavior of the system is further extended to the case when the occurrences of events are probabilistic.