In industrial automation, control systems and mechatronic devices are from
diverse nature, supplied by different manufacturers and made of different
technologies. The adoption of web services principles in an automated
production system satisfies some requirements, namely the interoperability of
such heterogeneous and distributed environments and the basis for flexibility
and reconfigurability. Manufacturing processes require to access resources at
different precedence levels and time instances, but in the other way resources
may also be shared by different processes. A major challenge is then how
individual services may interact, coordinating their activities. Petri nets may be
used to describe complex system behaviour and therefore also applied to
coordinate such systems. The paper introduces a Petri net based approach for the
design, analysis and coordination of systems developed using web services to
represent individual and autonomous resources. For this purpose, it is presented
a Petri nets computational tool to support the design, validation and coordination
of web service based automation systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
