Visual Programming and Development of Manufacturing Processes Based on Hierarchical Petri Nets

In this contribution we present a formalism to combine the well-known process modeling technique based on Petri nets with the recent developments in Visual Programming for robot programming. The resulting modeling approach enables process developers and robot programmers to follow a hierarchical approach to process development and to profit from the extensive analysis techniques developed for Petri nets, as well as the specialized robot programming features of the Visual Programming system. We applied our approach to an exemplary robot manufacturing process, demonstrating its modeling capabilities.