With the growing popularity of complex dynamic activities in manufacturing processes, traceability of the entire life of every product has drawn significant attention especially for food, clinical materials, and similar items. This paper studies the traceability issue in cyber-physical manufacturing systems from a theoretical viewpoint. Petri net models are generalized for formulating dynamic manufacturing processes, based on which a detailed approach for enabling traceability analysis is presented. Models as well as algorithms are carefully designed, which can trace back the lifecycle of a possibly contaminated item. A practical prototype system for supporting traceability is designed, and a real-life case study of a quality control system for bee products is presented to validate the effectiveness of the approach.
Keywords: Petri net; cyber-physical manufacturing systems; product quality control; traceability.