Towards the Physical Internet with Coloured Petri Nets

Coloured Petri Nets can be a valuable and powerful tool to design, analyse, and control the subsystems composing the Physical Internet, as they are able to capture the precedence relations and interactions among events which characterize the facilities and infrastructures (multimodal logistics centres and hubs, transit centres, roads and railways) through which p-containers are delivered. In this paper, the use of Coloured Petri Nets in the field of the Physical Internet is discussed and an example of the application of such a modelling tool to a multimodal hub in the PI is provided. The multimodal hub consists of four areas: a port area at which vessels arrive and depart, a train terminal for rail transportation, a road terminal for truck-to-X (and vice-versa) transhipment, and a storage area. The storage area and the road terminal are considered in detail, and two nets representing a section of a pconveyor and a p-sorter/p-composer are proposed to illustrate the applicability of the CPN formalism to the Physical Internet paradigm.